Tag Archives: Amazon

Become an online review-collecting sensation

How to Get Honest Reviews

As an author, I can tell you that one of the hardest things is to get reviews for your work. When soliciting friends, relatives and social media followers, comes up nil, what does one do? How to Get Honest Reviews by Shelley Hiltz and Heather Hart is a detailed and precise guide that might help answer that question for authors in their pursuit of reviews for their work.

In their book, Hiltz and Hart leave no digital stone unturned for their readers. How to Get Honest Reviews is a catalogue of places and practical strategies anyone can immediately set into action in their search for reviewers. Of particular interest is the section on how to set up a book review program. Here, the authors include step-by-step instructions for everything from establishing a mailing list to templates to use and adapt to communicate with program participants.

Hiltz and Hart’s writing style is user-friendly and informative which makes for easy reading (if you ignore the awkward “I (author’s name)” syntax used to introduce which of the two has written the current section). How to Get Honest Reviews makes readers feel as if, with a little elbow grease, they can become an online review-collecting sensations.

Please note that I was provided this book free by the authors in exchange for my honest review.

The Writing Life

Publishing online is not easy. There are a lot of questions that continue to frustrate me. Why, if I’m a Canadian writing a book that takes place in Canada, is my Kindle book listed on Amazon.com but not on on Amazon.ca? Where do I send people to order my CreateSpace publish-on-demand novel? Why, since CreateSpace and Amazon are essentially the same company, does Amazon not offer the print version of my book? Why does CreateSpace require an EIN number (American Employee Identification Number), while other services do not? Why does the iBookstore require I have a Mac computer before I can upload an eBook, yet I can distribute it at the iBookstore via Lulu without one? And how long does it take for it to be published at the iBookstore (and for the “pending” status to be removed)?

And then there are the questions that have nothing to do with the actual publishing, but with the publicity aspect of publishing. Where can I send my press release so that it actually gets published in the print media? What do I post to my blog or web page or Twitter feed or Facebook page, Pintrest, Google+, etc. that will make people take notice? How many social media outlets are too many to which to subscribe? How many online eBook publishers? What is a good price point at which to set my eBook? My paperback?

The learning curve for this experience has definitely skyrocketed, and it continues to soar with each new day. It’s been almost a week and I still haven’t lost my sales virginity yet. I’m hoping to get all of the kinks out this time around and make any mistakes I’m going to make now so that the process will be smooth sailing for the next time.

My Biography

English teacher and former archaeologist Elise Abram is proud to announce the release of PHASE SHIFT, her first fiction publication. Abram has been writing ever since she can remember, but it wasn’t until she was asked to teach Writer’s Craft in 2001 that she began to write seriously. Having to research writing and the writing process gave her the confidence she needed to actually put proverbial pen to paper. Her first novel, THE GUARDIAN was partially published as a Twitter novel a few summers back. Nearly ten years after its inception Abram decided it was time to stop shopping around with traditional publication houses and try to publish PHASE SHIFT on her own.

PHASE SHIFT documents the adventures of archaeologists Molly McBride and her husband, Dr. Palmer Richardson after they are given an unusual artifact with the ability to take them to a doppelganger Earth. Palmer Richardson, forensic anthropologist and head of the Archaeology department at the University of Toronto, is a character Abram first conceived in 1987 when taking a Science Fiction English course at The University of Waterloo (Clinton Johns, co-star of THE GUARDIAN was also conceived at that time). Writing a short story as the final assignment for that course was the first time she’d melded her passion for archaeology with storytelling.

Abram continues to write, no easy task, given the demands of teaching three English courses each semester, and raising three teenagers simultaneously. Currently, she is working on another Molly McBride adventure, tentatively called THE NEXT COMING RACE, and inspired by Edward Bullwer-Lytton’s classic “The Coming Race”, which melds known pseudo-scientific and paranormal phenomenon in a race to save the world from certain destruction after a device left behind by aliens in the future is activated by construction in the present. Also in the works is THE REVENANT, a take on the current young adult vampire craze, and CHICKEN OR EGG: A LOVE STORY, revolving around a time travel love triangle.

Look for the publication of eBook novellas THE MUMMY WORE COMBAT BOOTS, which follows Palmer Richardson in a case in which he consults for the Metropolitan Toronto Police Department to figure out the origins of an errant mummy found in the Royal Ontario Museum’s holdings, and THROWAWAY CHILD, in which Molly joins with Police Constable Michael Crestwood (also starring in THE MUMMY WORE COMBAT BOOTS and THE NEXT COMING RACE) to investigate a child’s skeleton found beneath a historic house.

Amazon author’s site: http://www.amazon.com/author/eliseabram