Where have all the Review Bloggers gone?

[MHPHILLIPS]

As some of you may know, recently I posted my first e-book on Amazon. Following what other authors have done and suggested doing, I have attempted to have reviews of my new e-book contemplated by as many review blogs, sites, forums, etc...as possible. In my search for these places, I have noticed a fair amount of bloggers saying they have closed their reviews to indie and self published authors, have stopped reviewing or have closed down their blog-site. With this in mind, have we reached the saturation point with regards to the blogs and forums where marketing your book is concerned? My feeling is that the apex of this use of blogs and other internet entities may have been during the Hocking rise to fame. Now, after many years and publicity, all of us are trying to use what others have found success in doing to capture that elusive dream and overloading the system. With thousands of new authors hoping against hope to make it to the top, will we all need to find other avenues to reach a potential audience?

[Sommer Leigh]

There are still plenty of review bloggers out there, particularly in YA, Fantasy, and Romance.

That being said, almost no one will review a self-published work. There are bloggers out there that specialize in self-pubbed and indie books, but the bigger review blogs won't touch them. There are a number of reasons for this and all of them valid, even if it is unfair to the self-pubbers and indies. 1) Too many people self-pub. This creates a glut of stories and review bloggers are just one person doing it for fun and can't possibly wade through the sheer volume of self-pub works. 2) Most self-pubbed stories are not ready to be published. This is just a fact of the business. Reviewers don't have time to pick out stories that are actually ready for publication from those that clearly aren't. 3) Readers want to know about the big new releases from the publishers. Readers still aren't quite ready to trust the self-pubbers yet and they need the gatekeepers to tell them what's already good. This is primarily due to the fact so much self-pubbed work is not actually read for publication.

[Hillsy]

With thousands of new authors hoping against hope to make it to the top, will we all need to find other avenues to reach a potential audience?

Short answer: Kind of

Long answer: Not all authors will need to change tactics. Problem is the ratio of success to failure will drop as more people enter the fray in this manner. Advertising, marketting, technology - they all obey a kind of entropy, one where once something has moved on, you can't go back. So to maximise your chances, you'll need to do something different. Whether it be Throwing money at the problem and hiring staff/buying "air time", trying something inventive a la Christopher Paolini's school visits, or be totally mercenary about the whole thing and market aggressively. Otherwise you're relying on the traditional "Be brilliant or lucky" method.

See there's also a secondary issue to this which is inequality. The "gate keepers" also acted a bit like a Floodbarrier. Supply and demand states that prices fall in a state of high demand. The traditional publication system tended to a saturation point that held supply at a steady-ish level. Knock down that floodbarrier and supply rises waaaaay above demand, driving down the price of the commidity. Perhaps media has a unique situation where the supply won't likely fall to so few players (e.g there won't be 1500000 different types of cola or only 10 authors in the world), but the fact is those that succeed will do so on a scale far and above the average. We're seeing more multi millionaire authors each week - but for each 1 of those we don't see the new 1000 authors that float a book and fail.

As such being among the first to discover new and unique ways to advertise will give a huge shot in the arm to their chances. And because of the entropic nature of marketting, once that new method has been swallowed as mainstream, you have to find something new, continually....

[Amanda Elizabeth]

I still review, though its mainly YA.The only non-YA was because I got sent a free copy of the book (Between You & Me by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus). If someone sent me their book I'd read and review it regardless of what the genre is. I've only taken a back seat to reviewing because I've been concentrating on getting my own book out there.

[MHPHILLIPS]

To those of you who responded who are bloggers, do you have the fan base to exclude indie writers? Would it not be appealing to the blogger with little blog traffic to entice all of the authors who are being turned down by more successful bloggers to a blog site that caters to them? Just a thought...

[Amanda Elizabeth]

I've only been doing it a short time so I don't have a fan base at all I read and review mainly what I like -- YA, mostly sci-fi and fantasy -- I'm not purposely excluding anyone.

[Aimée]

I am a book review blogger! But I don't review eBooks...

[Benzeknees]

I have been reading a lot on this topic lately. I believe more authors will have to go the route of paying for professional editing in order to have a readable product before submitting it for review. I have tried reading a number of self-pubbed books & the reading was so difficult, they would be very difficult to review objectively. How many times can you say the punctuation was so bad it made it extremely difficult to read or the spelling errors were so numerous you could barely read the story.
I would gladly do more reviews for authors if they sent me their books, as long as there has been some editing already done so they are readable.

[CharleeVale]

I missed this topic when it surfaced several weeks ago, and I'll respond now.

I'm a Book Review Blogger (Though Grad school has stopped me from posting since like September!) I don't do self-pubbed books (Unless I know the author personally) , and I'll tell you why.

The amount of self-published authors who have come to me DEMANDING reviews of their book, is astounding. And I'm not even that big of a blog! Not to mention being bombarded with spam about cover reveals, book events, giveaways, etc. Most of the time I've never even heard of these people. I don't know how they even got my personal e-mail address!

So to sum up, I don't do self-pubbed books because of the margin. Because of those authors who have taught me not to trust the indies. Because of the volume of horrible crap that I receive in my inbox everyday. Is it fair? No. Is it necessary? Yes.

(Again, this totally excludes self-published authors who are my friends/acquaintances, who I trust)

CV

[Diggi]

The amount of self-published authors who have come to me DEMANDING reviews of their book, is astounding.
CV

I think this is the point -> demanding to be reviewed...When you see a person in real life, you won`t go directly to him/her and ask, if he/she can review your book. You would first try to learn him/her to know. And after a while and some conversations, you would possibly ask when it fits.