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Last week, I reminisced about my childhood reading habits. No surprise I’m such a nerd nowadays, huh? Oh, you didn’t read the post, you say? That’s fine, there’s no need to blush, sweetie. I invite you to check it here. 

Well, my dearest, I saved the best for last – SPREADING THE WORD.

You busted your behind polishing your text to perfection. You created an attractive cover. You mastered the eBook formatting with honors. You even created a printed version of your masterpiece. And much like the old saying, you believed once your book was ready, the readers would come. In your wildest dreams, they would flock in thousands to buy it.

Days and weeks passed and the readers didn’t come in the quantities or with the frequency you had imagined. Every time you logged into your account to check on sales, you dreaded seeing the rude arrow pointing down as your title plunged that famous online bookstore rankings. Your hopes began to falter and you doubted yourself.  

Do you remember my first post on Marketing Indie Books? I said most authors don’t want to bother with promoting their books. They’d rather concentrate on the creative process. That’s harder to accomplish for indie authors and I wrote extensively about the reasons then. I won’t repeat myself. You can find it here.

After you published your first book, (or second or tenth), you found out you needed to tell your readers about it because that nasty arrow on your sales dashboard kept disappearing at the bottom of the computer screen. What better way to do that than to have reviews posted where readers go to choose their next books?

There are many websites and Facebook pages where you find people who review books. All kinds of people reviewing all kinds of books. All you have to do is send them a copy and they’ll read it and post their opinion. Right? Are you sure? Really?! When are they going to do that? Where are they going to post their reviews? Your book is on sale only on one online store but the reviewer doesn’t have an account there. They have an account on the same store – Yay!! – but later you discover it’s on another marketplace – one that doesn’t help with your book’s ranking. Not to mention the people who get your book and never bother to post a review. I prefer to think they didn’t like my book because the alternative reason is preposterous.

I wasted a lot of time searching for reviewers and contacting them before I got to a rare oasis in this dry internet landscape: Rave Reviews Book Club. If you’re a member, you know what I’m talking about. If you’re not, go there NOW and join. You don’t know what you’re missing. Rave Review Book Club is the only place I found which offers such an impressive number of high-quality authors committed to supporting one another. This kind of network is priceless. Not to mention that a review written by an author looks so much better than a three-word comment from a regular customer on the online store. It makes your book look better, even if the rating is a ‘four star’, as opposed to a five-star comment stating your book is “a good read.”

Now, if you’re an author who doesn’t know, or doesn’t want to learn, how to create an attractive cover; to master the eBook formatting; or to create a printed version of your masterpiece. If you want to concentrate your best efforts and your precious time on writing your next novel, I recommend you find professionals who will take care of those things for you. They can do it all, except the writing bit, or do just the parts you don’t like or don’t have time to do.

I searched for such professionals for a while as well. Much as it happened when I looked for reviewers, I found out there were all kinds of people offering all kinds of services within the publishing industry. They offered complete packages or compartmentalized ones. There were very expensive services as well as extremely cheap ones. In most cases, a superficial analysis of their clients’ rankings on major online stores was enough to make me run for the hills. In other ones, just logging into their websites offered me evidence that the quality of their services was not what I wanted for my book. I had worked so hard on it. I wanted only the best for my baby, I mean, book. LOL

That was when I chose the people I trusted the most. People who respect books as much as I do. People who cherish authors, who make a point of supporting them. People who strive to deliver quality products because they are as much of a perfectionist as I am – the team at 4Willspublishing. Thank you for your hard work and congratulations on your many successful stories. You deserve all the praises you can get! YOU ROCK!

Thank you once again for stopping by today. Please, leave your thoughts and spread the word!!