Yikes! Sales are up! 4 paperback copies of Once Upon A Week in the past two days. Don’t know if these came through the website or not but let me tell you, this is like a stampede. Thank you to those who bit the bullet.
In other news the word count on my new novel is now 22,222.
Continuing from yesterday. Am I writer? Yes – I have the books to prove it. Am I a good writer? I cannot go off sales figures here so I can only go off reviews.
REWIND 10
TROUBLE CROSS 2
It is Rewind where I have to put my faith. 60 e-books sold and 1 paperback (I can understand why this is – the ludicrous Amazon pricing structure for print versions) culminating in 10 reviews, 7 UK and 3 US.
The 7 UK reviews are all positive – 4 and 5 stars – and everyone liked the book. Only one slight criticism about the ending being a little abrupt but that is because there was to be a sequel.
Most of the reviews are from the early days on Amazon but the most recent was only 8 months ago, from a young couple I met on a cruise. They did not know me from Adam at the time but he was into time travel and interested in reading Rewind. I gave them a copy I had with me and he had read the whole thing in two days. Rich and Jenny are good friends now but at that time I was just an unknown author and on-board shuffleboard / quiz partner.
Let’s go Stateside. Now here we have one review that calls Rewind, “a boring, ridiculous mess”, and I am glad that I only just noticed this one recently. If I had seen this in 2015 when it was written, I may have given up there and then. However, there is another review in 2018 from a US lady who “really enjoyed” the story, although she did have a reservation about a sexual issue, which I don’t understand myself – not in 1971. Check it out for yourself – https://www.amazon.co.uk/REWIND-DAVID-WARDLE-ebook/dp/B00ANX65M6/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_pl_foot_top?ie=UTF8
Even before these US customer reviews, the only professional review I have was given by US website Readers’ Favorite in 2013 not long after the launch on Amazon. One could pay a fee for a speedy review but I declined this because I did not want one I had bought. It took a few months to come through but it was a very positive 4 star review.
Based on this I think the 1 star comment can be regarded as an outlier. 9 good reviews and 1 bad one, so 90% of owners who expressed a preference said that they preferred it and maybe their cats did too.
From all this I have to assume that Rewind is a good book that readers like and that it should be seen by a wider audience. Is sending it out again to literary agents and quoting the existing reviews the thing to do? Proof that the readership would be out there. I have tried it and it seems that this cuts no sway.
Even if it is only one out of four, at least it would seem I can write a good book.