So I mentioned about two posts ago how well Gallivant Books did with Reich TV and Bianca: The Silver Age at the Ad Astra Convention in Toronto -- which just underscores the uphill battle a small press faces for spreading the word online. Folks walking by a dealer's table at an SF con are in the mood to buy, but the Internet's a super-mall. How do they find you? First, you got to bring 'em to the water.
I've met some very nice people online at a few indie review sites, but was dismayed by how there doesn't seem to be a "one-stop shop" for reviews in science fiction, fantasy and horror in the same model and with the same clout as say, reviewsbyjessewave for m/m fiction. Such is the power of Wave's site -- and it's fantastic, believe me -- that publishers are tripping over themselves to give free ebooks away on there to promote new releases, and they're smart to do so.
So what do you do if you have a great book with a premise that immediately captures the imagination, like for instance The Karma Booth? (They say, "Executing a murderer won't bring your loved one back." But now, it can. We get so many "oooooohs" of immediate interest over that one.) But there lies the rub.
"What makes promoting indie SF books so bloody hard is that there isn't a big quality high-traffic site that reviews indie SF," says a very nice reviewer I met online.
In essence, here's a terrific genre, in fact, group of genres we love, but no online Mecca for indies. Sure, there's Goodreads, and that's fine, but we're talking about a central place with someone minding the fort and recruiting talented, fair reviewers while keeping any politics or in-fights from reaching a rolling boil. Frankly, if I wasn't so busy trying to contribute to indie SF, I'd be tempted to start one, but at the risk of sounding presumptuous, I'd like to help the supply end of good product first -- for which I think there's even more of a dire need, but that's a topic for another day by someone else.
According to my friend reviewer, who prefers to stay anonymous, "99% of book blogs out there resemble personal blogs with a really poor signal to noise ratio. There's general-fiction personal blogs that have high traffic and high name recognition like http://gracekrispy.blogspot.com (who is amazing for promotions), but could be hit/miss in terms of finding that target SF/F audience."
This is a person who really knows the landscape, so I'm passing along their remarks with barely a copy edit (none is needed) because I think these insights are bang on:
"For some reason, everyone wants to sit in their own corner of the Internet, instead of aggregating and providing more value for SF genre readers and writers. I actually think having a single reviewer in a blog is pretty limiting because the reader and the writer is stuck to the quirky and possibly banal selections of a single individual rather than the more comprehensive coverage like a nice and more professional sites like the Ranting Dragon does."
So do we settle for that, SF, fantasy and horror fans? Anyone feel like gathering the troops? :-) This blog is intended as more of a launch point for discussion than me sounding the call, because I grant you, there's obvious self-interest in seeing a major review site come up for indie products in our genres. But it's not by accident that I included and dropped the names of other blog sites in here. Check them out and show your support. And perhaps one day we will have a new Wave with a great review site.
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Oh, and if you read this far, why not reward yourself? Don't forget those coupon codes in the previous blog entry that give you some money off the price of Bianca: The Silver Age and Reich TV at Smashwords. Or you can show your support for what we do by purchasing them directly from www.gallivantbooks.com
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