My Review Epiphany.

Hi Everyone!

Today I'm going to talk about reviews! Don't worry, this isn't a post begging people to review my book (soon to be books). This is more about an epiphany I had about reviews.

So, every author will say that they love getting reviews, myself included. Getting a great review, is like the cherry on top of the publishing a book sundae. ;-) I loved reading reviews on Little Samantha's Choice where readers would say that they thought Jackson was so sweet or Samantha was one lucky woman! Those reviews were one of, if not, the best things about publishing my story.

I also valued the couple not so decent reviews I got. One reviewer said that she skipped over parts of Little Samantha's Choice because she thought that it was too boring and unnecessary. At first, I was hurt because no author wants to be told that parts of their story were boring or unnecessary. But, after a few days, I thought about the review again and looking at it from another angle, I could see how she thought that. As a result, in my newest book coming out, Learning to be Little Again, I didn't focus so much on elaborating every thought that went through my characters minds. Instead, I kept the story moving at a faster pace. I possibly would have never done that without having received that honest review.

Here's where my epiphany comes in. So, I recently read Thianna D's book series, All They Ever Needed. I loved that book series, I gushed about it on Facebook...yet I never wrote a review for any of the books online. I took the time to tell countless people about it, but I couldn't take the time to write a couple sentences saying, "I loved your book because..."

This got me thinking back to how I loved getting reviewed for my book and I'd bet money that Thianna D or any author for that matter, loves getting reviews on their books. So, that made me feel like kind of a rotten person. I was expecting other people to review my book after reading it, but I wasn't taking the time to review books that I had read. To me, that's plain out wrong. I can't expect people to do something for me and then have me not do the same thing for them.

Besides the warm feeling that getting a review gives an author, it's also very important to other readers. A reader who isn't sure if they want to buy a book just from reading the blurb and sample, relies on reviews from other readers. I know I have before. In fact, reviews have saved me from buying books that sound good, but then turn out to be horrible. Reviews have also helped me buy books that I orginally thought sounded not so good, but actually were amazing stories.

Additionally, I'd think that reviews are just as important to the publishers as they are to the authors. The publishers put almost as much work in to a book as the author does. They read through the book a couple times, making a list of revisions for the author. They advise the author on what they should change or maybe add something to make the story sound better. Plus they create covers for the book and they answer all of the questions that an author has patiently. (Well, my publishers do at least.) So, they invest a lot of time in any story that they work on. If a book gets a lot of bad reviews, that could be because it wasn't properly edited, which can reflect badly on a publisher. A book that gets a lot of great reviews could show that the publication team helped the author tremendously to make a 5 star book.

With this all being said, reviews are important hands down. For me, I can't expect readers to write reviews for me, if I won't write them for other authors. That's why my goal for the rest of this year is to go through my list of kindle books, and write a review for every single book that I've finished reading.

That's my epiphany/ramble for today. I hope that everyone has a great day!