Well, the great “Guilty?” give away is into its third day. I
don’t have any figures yet but from what I’ve heard and what I’ve read it seems
to be going well.
You may wonder why anyone with pretensions to be a
successful writer would want to give their work away for free. I can’t talk for
anyone else but my reasons are twofold. First I hope that by giving the reading
public a taster of my writing I will spark enough interest in some of them to
get them to buy other books in the series and maybe, some of my other books
too. I’m never going to get rich this
way, the electronic versions of the books are priced far too cheaply for that,
but it would be nice to reach a wider audience.
The second reason for giving books away is hopefully to
generate reviews for my work. Personally when I download an e-book I go for
subject matter, price and then I look at the reviews. Reader’s opinions can
make or break a book but getting them is very difficult. I always try to leave
a review for the books I read, after all the writer spent months creating the book
and, knowing how important the review process can be, I try to spend a couple
of minutes saying what I thought of his or her work.
Of course, reviews can be a two edged sword. A bad review
can kill a book; at least it does for me. Unfortunately writers have no come
back or right of reply to comments readers leave and some readers seem to never
have anything positive to say about any book. On the other hand a series of
reviews does help the writer to know what the readers like, what they want and
what went wrong. Editing indie books is not a quick or easy process but it can
be done and if enough people want changes I’m happy to undertake them.
That being said it’s time for me to get writing. If you have
an e-reader, i-pad, kindle etc and you haven’t downloaded your free copy of “Guilty?”
yet you have until tomorrow night to do so. If you have got it, and you have
read it, I hope you enjoyed meeting Dean and Steph and that you now want to
follow more of their cases. Finally, if you have a couple of minutes to spare and
feel so inclined I would appreciate a review but that is not as important as
you enjoying the book.
