Addendum: I can appreciate your comments re discovery. But Amazon itself has discovery mechanisms such as messages pushed out through e-mail. In that sense it is already doing some book-reviewish things (though it’s no book review substitute).

Then again, Amazon may not be the best way to reach eBook readers–at least those readers who don’t own Kindles.

Rob Preece

In the main part of the blog, I’ll post an invitation to all regular TeleRead readers with books to promote. They can send me 200-word summaries and point to cover images at Amazon, etc.; I’ll publish the first ten or so that I receive. The readers won’t get the same space I use, obviously, but I’d like to do that anyway. It would be fun to see what other members of the TeleRead community are up to. Some of our most loyal regulars write romances, but as long as they’re the kind of titles that could be displayed at a typical U.S. public library, I’ll go with ‘em. Wait. I’ll actually make that 11 readers if you yourself have a book to mention and ten people get in line ahead of you. Send info to drNOSPAMteleread.com.

Now about the Scandals mentions. I do them in context to make my points on various topics and also to let readers know where I’m coming from on industry issues. Remember the New York Times guy who was writing on the credit crisis without mentioning his own extraordinary situation? Disclosure would have helped.

Sorry if the above approach rubs you the wrong way, though. I’ll try to give it a rest for a few days, except for the two ads and mention in the post proposed above—unless someone objects to the lack of disclosure. I also regularly disclose my little investment in Google made for retirement purposes, by the way.

A few more thoughts. The book industry is broken, badly, and it’s only natural to use the situations most familiar to me. Would you believe, my book isn’t even listed properly at Amazon. Unless you type “The,” you won’t even see the title of the paperback. The Pentagon is a model of efficiency compared to the book industry or at least the American part of it.

Now as for the ads—clearly noticeable as such—we use a standard WordPress arrangement; what appears in the home page appears almost everywhere. And here’s something else to consider. We have a high percentage of repeat visitors, but many of our readers are seeing the blog for the first time. We’re getting 50K-60K unique visitors a month, so someone must want to come back, ads or not.

The other factor is that my publisher is small and cash-strapped—a description that may soon fit the large houses, too!—so this is my way of making up for the lack of a budget and for the tendency of big-city dailies to diss books from small presses.

If you want TeleRead without ads for Scandals at least, I invite you to pay a subscription fee. Otherwise a little empathy will help.

Thanks,
David

Addendum: My kind of book, set in D.C. in the 1970s, will not appeal to the typical TeleRead reader. It’s the minority I’m after. I’m also trying targeted approaches at Facebook and elsewhere. I’d write further today about my Facebook efforts except that I might end up mentioning — ——- ——–.

You’re about to lose an avid reader here if you don’t give it a break.