Thank you so much for this great, interesting and helpful blog post, Chris. It encourages readers to write reviews and help and support us authors.
PLEASE
If not, why not?
I don’t have time
The author probably spent a heck of a lot more time writing the story than you took to read it, no matter how slow you think you are, so why not take a few minutes to record your feelings about it.
I can’t write long fancy reviews like those I see on book review blogs
You don’t have to, Amazon, for example, only ask you to use a minimum of 25 non repeating words.
I can’t express myself very well
No-one is asking you to produce a literary masterpiece, start off with things you liked, didn’t like or a mix of both about the book, e.g.,
…as a writer, I love paradox… the creative balance… peak and trough… princes and paupers… sweet and sour… I shamelessly strive for emotive expression in my novels… breathing feelings into what happens to my characters… Lawd knows, they cause me enough angst when I write about them… therefore, it should have come as no surprise to me when I embarked on the ambitious project of writing my own biography… the twin imposters of delight and melancholy currently visit with great regularity as the chapters of my life unfold on my laptop… from the outset, I decided it would not be an ego trip, cataloguing whatever achievements may have been my lot, but to attempt to balance the tome with as much gut honesty as I can muster… that’s where the pain resides… it has been remarkable how the distance of time has removed some of the jagged edges of some events I’d rather not have had happen… and equally to recognise that success is also a relative concept, which lessens with the passage of the years …
…I can speak only for this ol’ Scots Jurassic scribbler, but sense that hordes of my fellow-authors will agree, that selling even one copy of one title is a source of great satisfaction… to feel that even one single reader has taken time and invested money to indulge my work is such an immense pleasure… over the years since I was first absorbed into the mind-blowing vortex that is the world of writing books, the reading public has blessed and honoured me with more than 100,000 aggregate downloads and sales of my wee literary babies… like many of my contemporary successful writers, I pretend not to pay much attention to my author’s sales pages on Auntie Amazon Kindle, but that would be a blatant lie!…
…part of the role of being a prominent F.M.U. entailed, (naturally), whizzing around the globe, ostensibly arranging mega-billions worth of deals (Master Soros, eat yer heart out!)… a trip from the Far East had my itinerary taking in financial institutional visits in London, then carrying on to Noo Yawk in ‘Murica, to repeat the exercise with some of our American banking friends…
…my grateful thanks for some of my Guest Posters over the past few weeks who have helped to keep my blog alive, while I was BDOT (Busy Doing Other Things)… I make no apologies for the absence, as pressure of the day job (which pays the light bulbs and printer ribbons) have seen each day filled with ‘stuff’… part of that ‘stuff’, frankly, has been a commercial stream of business allied to my writing… I’ve alluded to it a few times last year, and it has grown into a sizable chunk of my waking day… ghostwriting… sum’how, (thankfully), the WURD has gone out that Master Gallacher ‘writes a bit, and writes rather well’ – so much so, I have just embarked on my eighth ghostwriting engagement in the past twelve months, doing autobiographies and family/corporate histories…
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