Swag

[Adam]

Still, I admit I shouldn;t have been so dismissive after that first bad review. I've been assured by several people that you get a lot of bad reviews before you get a good one, and I wonder what kind ofreviews the actual book will get once I give out those copies as -- you guessed it -- swag.

You know, I'm not really convinced that a) reviews help sales in any major positive or negative way or b) bad reviews are less helpful to a publisher than good reviews.

I moseyed around and found what I assume is the review in question, and many of the problems listed are a) fixable and b) stuff that can be improved in future printings and supplements.

For example, editing - there are plenty of people on The Forge [myself included] who are proficient editors, and who work for relatively inexpensive rates for indie publishers. Since you're selling the book as an e-book the current e-book version can be updated to include the corrections. The print version can't until you sell out the first print run [or until you're willing to take a loss on the X remaining copies,] but you can always provide people who buy the print version with a free download of the PDF version so they can get the up to date version without typos and errors. It's not perfect, but it's a good gesture to the people that have the printed version.

The rest of the criticisms can't be so easily dealt with, but they certainly serve as a good place to start examining your opinions for future books: Using different artists, further editing to smooth over rough writing, extra proofing after the layout stages, etc.

Getting bad reviews isn't fun but I certainly think it can be useful. It's the same way I feel about getting a heavily edited manuscript or piece of layout back - sure, there's a bit of dissapointment over not getting the job done right the first time, but if it improves things in the long run, I'm all for it.