Pay to have my book reviewed? Seriously?

Like all indie authors, I have to do my own advertising/marketing. As someone who started to write after retiring, I have had to work on an advertising budget of £$€ ZERO funding. My publishing costs are low because I have taken the POD (Print On Demand) route. My only real expenses are small payments for distribution costs. Feed A Read.com enables me to keep costs down yet appear on the likes of Amazon and other online distributors. I have to do my typesetting and cover art design work, as well as advertising artwork. Once again, my budget is tight. While I do appreciate there are artists out there who do book cover artwork I prefer to do my own. It helps to keep costs down. Where I draw the line is at paid reviews.

The idea of paying someone to write a book review is something I find incredibly distasteful. One has to immediately question the integrity of any paid reviewer. Do they even actually bother to read with any degree of interest? No doubt there will be howls of protest. Really? Tell me they don’t just scan and skip through the book and offer up some vagueness? I know that my reviews come from actual readers. Readers who I know have taken the trouble to buy and read my novels. I haven’t prompted them to write reviews. They wrote the reviews because they genuinely enjoyed the books.

No wonder publisher manage to sell some of the trite waste of print they like to dish out by celebs.

Don’t even get me started on literary agents. As for publishers with tram-lined genres…I’ll save my comments for a later time.

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