Sometime last year I signed on with Goodreads (www.goodreads.com), a virtual book club where people fill shelves with virtual books and more often than not rate and write reviews. These are not critically acclaimed reviews, and are often disparaged by legacy publishers and authors. To my view, however, the forum Goodreads provides, and the reader reviews posted there, are a grassroots, honest response from the people who count the most in the literary world, besides the authors, and that is the readers. It is the reader who make an investment in both time and money when it comes to books, often risking both on an unknown author, and therefore, in my opinion, is one of the most important stake-holders in the publishing industry. It is, after all, the reader who decides, in the end, which books make best-seller lists. It’s not the magazines, the newspapers, the radio or television talk shows, although certainly they help with hype. It’s the fundamental, on-the-street buyer who decides to listen to the recommendation put forward by Joe they shared a beer with last night.

In the spring of this year I opted into a promotional program Goodreads offers authors, whereby a lottery give-away is created. The author chooses how many copies of a book to give away, and how long to run the contest. Goodreads tabulates the entrants and sends the final list, with mailing addresses (which is not to be in any manner stored or used for promotional purposes) to the author who then, according to the agreement, sends out said copies of books. The winners of the give-away are under a covenant, which is not binding, to review the book.

And the Angels Sang, my anthology of short speculative fiction, is now beginning to garner readers’ reviews from one of those give-aways, and to my delight what people have to say is encouraging, so much so that I have every hope my readership has expanded and people will want to purchase my other books.

What are readers saying? Take a look here.

Alternatively, indie publishers and authors can drive sales to Amazon. Why do that? As your Amazon sales increase, so do your Amazon sales ratings, which affects comparison shopping offerings on the site, as well as search engine ratings.

Our own Paul Lima, author of How to Write a Non-fiction Book in 60 Days, has some pretty impressive statistics on various Amazon sites today:

#51 in Non-fiction writing books on www.amazon.com

#4 in reference-writing-non-fiction on www.amazon.co.uk

#35 in non-fiction on www.amazon.ca

And Deb Salisbury, author of Elephant’s Breath & London Smoke ranks #11 in books on fashion at www.amazon.com

To all the nay-sayers out there, I say, Yes We Can!