Amanda Hocking on Self-Publishing

[deborahjross]

A lot of authors tend to over market or they don’t take criticisms very well. They think that their book is perfect. They don’t want to get bogged down with editing or covers, because they think their book is so good. Or they market too hard. All they do is talk about their book and nobody wants to hear, ‘Buy my book.’ They want to have a conversation with you … Also, new writers respond to negative reviews and have great catastrophic meltdowns. You can’t respond to reviews at all except to say ‘thank you for reading the book.’ That’s the best you can do; otherwise, you’re just going to look bad even if the reviewer is totally out of line.

The rest of the article is here.

Comments

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

I'm a big fan of this smart young woman. The first thing she did was write books many readers wanted to read. Everything else followed from that--and she did many things right.

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

Yep. Write good books. Have interesting conversations. Network with reviewers. Give readers a reason to check your work out.

Sounds like a plan to me.