Yeah, it's my Birthday. And I'm feeling every year of it. Just don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing!:-)

Should I charge more?

I'm starting to think I'm not charging enough for my books, when I see people writing less, and charging more, and doing okay with sales. Makes you wonder.

I need reviews (to counteract the ones who are paying for them)

It's never fun to find out that several of the now famous ebook authors got famous by paying a grand or two to a company to generate fake reviews on Amazon. You can do some google searches, this all came out in the last month. Now that they're famous, some of them ratted out the service. Guess they didn't want any competition? And of course they're not being punished for it. It's not like they're bad writers, really, but how can I compete? On Amazon it is Ratings and Reviews that determine rankings, not sales. If all the people who bought my books (several thousand at this point) rated them, I'd be a highly ranked author and I wouldn't have to spend hundreds of dollars on advertising to get the word out. Because Amazon promotes high ranking books. So if you've ever read my stuff and liked it, pop on over to Amazon and rate it! Please!!! It's hard to keep writing stuff, if people don't care enough to take 5 seconds and assign a star rating to it. Or take another 20 seconds to write a few words about it. Authors LIVE off of reviews, more than anything else. I also write under a pen name, I write slightly cheesy paranormal romance. Most of the stuff averages about 12K words. I can pop one out in a weekend. I don't write a lot of them because I don't enjoy it as much. But I sell a lot of them. I also have probably gotten more reviews for those than I have my novels. Women love the stuff and want me to keep writing it - and they tell me by writing reviews. If I enjoyed it more, I'd write a lot more of it and give up on the scifi and fantasy. But I don't enjoy it all that much, I started out doing it for fun, and using it as a tool to work on dialogue and story structure. So quit being such a passive audience, tell me if you like it. Then rate it and review it! And do the same for any other author you like out there. Otherwise don't be surprised if they go away. -John