As I creep a little bit closer to the launch date for book one in the series, it’s starting to feel more and more like a real book.
This week, I received notification that the first of the paid reviews I had ordered was available for viewing. I had ordered a review from BookLife which is a service that Publisher’s Weekly offers. I have not yet made the review public (an option which BookLife offers to you) but I will be doing it since it is a very good review.
This review is on Up the Creek, the first book in the series, which is the only one I have booked any paid reviews for. My goal was to have some nice pull quotes to use on my book cover and website as well as a review I can share under the editorial reviews section on the book listing on Amazon and other retailers. I am pleased to report that I do have that.
As far as making the review public, I want to time it to have the best impact for my forthcoming book since the book won’t actually be available until January. In general in traditional publishing book reviews usually appear in print on the week of publication.
One thing that’s kind of cool about how the BookLife review works is that besides a full written review they give you a report card on production, and they gave me an A for my cover design. So, that was cool!
The other thing that arrived this week, is the hard copy proof of Haunted Houses, the third book in this four-book series. Once again I’m astounded by the speed at which Amazon ships out proof copies, and I am very pleased with how things look.
One more behind the scenes thing I tackled this week was making sure my Amazon Advertising account was up and ready to go, so that when the books do release I can start running some Amazon ads for them. It’s a long story, but because I have different products that I sell on Amazon besides books, I need to have more than one advertising account. It is kind of a pain, and I really wish Amazon could have figured out some way to roll everything into one account, but alas, they have not.
Anyway, it had been awhile since I had used my book advertising account, and apparently the credit card I had linked to it had since expired. Also apparently when that card expired I still owed Amazon 12 cents. So, even though it didn’t seem like that big of a deal it took me a couple of attempts to get the card updated and my balance paid, and so now my book advertising account is all ready to go.
