So today I made a first step towards getting my Space Opera trilogy Lioness of Cygnus Five noticed. I have 15 reviews on the first book, and none at all on the next two or on the box set. This is deeply depressing. In an effort to take my career seriously, I’ve bought a piece of software called Book Review Targeter, which claims to make it easier to find reviewers for your books.
I liked the way I could put in ‘Space Opera’ and get a list of books returned, among which I could choose to look up reviewers for the ones that were most like my own. That seemed like it was really working.
I did not like the way the ‘Export to CSV’ function ended up giving me a single line of nonsense when I opened it in LibreOffice. Nor did I like the fact that the ‘Archive’ function does not seem to archive the information in any place you can reach afterwards. I lost the entirety of my first search by archiving it before I manually recorded the results by cutting and pasting them – and of course the lost results still counted towards my weekly allottment. Nor could they be searched for a second time.
I did not like the way that the reviewers’ website links that I clicked did not take me to reviewers’ websites – two were ‘site not found’ pages and one was a website about some Eco-company with nothing to do with books.
I was promised templates for good emails I could send to these reviewers, and there are no templates. I guess it’s possible that those were for the more expensive ‘Pro’ version.
I hope that the reviewers’ email addresses are at least sound, or this is 100% a rip off and disappointment. We’ll find out about that tomorrow, when I start writing to them.