How I Almost Killed My Series and My Best Book

by L.J. Sellers, author of provocative mysteries & thrillers

I've been reminded of that nearly tragic scenario because Dying for Justice, the fifth book in the Detective Jackson series, just won the silver in the 2012 Readers Favorite Awards in the Mystery category.

But I almost abandoned this novel and the whole series back in winter 2009/2010. I had decided to give up the series because it was floundering under a small publisher. I'd had two failed launches in a row and I wasn't making money. I thought if I could launch a new series with a new character and new publisher, I might be able to save my career. So I mapped out a plot in which Detective Evans, one of Jackson’s sidekicks, was the lead character with Jackson as a strong secondary character—hoping my readers would come along with the new series. I thought I had written my last Jackson book.

Then everything changed. I was laid off my newspaper job, e-books started to take off, and I re-envisioned my novelist career. I set aside Dying for Justice  to rewrite two standalone thrillers and publish them on Kindle, then to regain the rights to my other Jackson novels and self-publish them as well. That took six months.

In October, my Jackson stories became bestsellers on Kindle and readers were asking for more. At that point, I was ready to start writing again. After reading through my outline for the Evans-based story, I decided I really liked the plot and would go ahead and write it, giving the two detectives equal POV roles.

Dying for Justice went on to become a readers’ favorite and the highest-rated crime-fiction novel on Amazon. It also fully launched the Evans character who later took a starring role in The Gauntlet Assassin, my futuristic thriller, another reader favorite. So today I'm celebrating the Jackson story that almost didn’t make it to publication, but I’m so glad it did.


Here's a link to an excerpt if you're curious. 

Have you ever abandoned a novel and regretted it? Or brought it back later in a new form?

Catch 22 of Great Reviews: Thanks, John Locke!

by L.J. Sellers, author of provocative mysteries & thrillers

This week we learned that John Locke—one of the first indie authors to sell a million books—paid for hundreds of reviews at a now-defunct paid-review site that didn’t require its reviewers to read the books, just to crank out the stars. Because the story made the NY Times, one expert estimates that a third of all Amazon reviews are fake.

This pisses me off, breaks my heart, and makes me—and the other terrific and honest indie authors on this site—look bad. That is, if we have too many great reviews.

GalleyCat weighed in on this issue with this blog post, listing several bestsellers that each have more than 150 one-star reviews. The point of the short piece is that real bestsellers have lots of bad reviews as well as many good ones. The unspoken point is that books with too many good reviews and few bad ones must not be a real bestsellers, that those reviews must have been paid for or written by marketers or friends.

I resent this! Without good reviews, you’re treated like a hack and can’t sell books. Too many good reviews and not enough dogs, and you look like a phony. Obviously some authors—and publishers—resort to these tactics. But many of the books on Amazon’s bestselling and top-rated lists come by their reviews honestly.

I know I did. Dying for Justice is the top-rated novel on two of Amazon’s lists—police procedurals and mystery series—with 54 five-star reviews, 8 four-stars, and 1 one-star (idiot). Not one was paid for or written by a marketer. My sister claims she wrote a review, but she loves my work. And I can’t find it, if she did. And I have many great reviews in print magazines—Mystery Scene, Crimespree, Spinetingler, and RT Reviews—to support those online "amateur" reviews.

Yes, I gave away the book on Goodreads, with the idea that readers would post reviews, but I took my chances that they would be in my favor. And yes, I asked readers in a blog to post reviews for the book—but always with the caveat “if you read and enjoyed the story.” I don’t want or need fake support.

Here’s a question for GalleyCat: If a book with a lot of fake five-star ratings wasn’t good, wouldn’t a lot of honest readers start to give it bad reviews? You can’t fool everybody forever. No author has that many loyal friends or fake online IDs—except maybe Stephen Leather, another example of how some big-name indie authors are making the rest of us look bad.

And I have to throw in one more issue. The site that Locke used was clearly corrupt. Reviewers were directly paid to crank out good blurbs without even reading the books. But what about sites like Book Rooster? For a $60 admin fee, the site lists your e-book internally, then their unpaid reviewers sign up to receive and read books of their choosing. In exchange for free books, they write honest reviews.

This process seems fine to me, and I used the site for The Suicide Effect, my least-read book, just to get some reviews. But there was no guarantee of how many reviews or what they would be. It was just an opportunity for exposure, and I got lucky, mostly. But now I’m wondering if that was a mistake, just because the exchange of money (for the administrative fee) might make people lump the service into a paid-review category—even though no money goes to the reviewers.

What do you think? Have you read John Locke’s work? Does he deserve his success? Are you skeptical of any books with almost entirely good reviews? Do you think Book Rooster is a legitimate service? Should Amazon take Locke's work down to show it's serious about the trust factor for customer reviews?