As a self-published writer I know how hard it is to get editorial or customer reviews. Harder than writing the book. But I have to; otherwise why would readers trust me, someone they’ve never heard of, especially when there isn’t a big publishing house to back me up? “A best seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well.” (S. Boorstein). More reviews will bring in more readers, who will further write more reviews, good or bad.
Now paid customer reviews are generally considered unethical, but to get editorial reviews, self-published authors do need to spend hundreds of dollars. Even CreateSpace, Amazon’s self-publishing platform, encourages you to purchase those editorial-review packages, each costing $400 or so. To get customer reviews, you go through the list of indie-blog reviewers and beg everyone who accepts your genres to write a review. Normally those bloggers are already bombarded with hundreds of review requests every month and, in the end, you get about a handful of reviews if you are lucky. Authors who could afford it use services like NetGalley to distribute review copies; others simply give away thousands of free copies to readers, hoping that some of them may eventually read and review it. And mind you, those readers typically have dozens if not hundreds of free books already stored in their Kindles. I never liked the idea of distributing free copies on a massive scale like this. Why shouldn’t writers be paid for their work?
That’s why I saw hope when I encountered the pay-per-chapter platform (http://www.novkey.com). This is like dating: you no longer have to make a “life-long” commitment to a stranger. You put in some small investment as you go through each chapter. Whenever you feel this is not for you, you simply move on to another book. Readers don’t have to consider what others say about the book---even if everyone likes a book, it may not suit them.
It seems there have been bad examples regarding similar models years ago, e.g., some author charged unreasonably high prices for the last few chapters (http://www.novelr.com/2009/05/01/why-pay-per-chapter-sucks), but this is easy to fix. We can ask the authors to set the price from the very beginning. And I think most authors would not do that to risk their reputations. Every new business needs regulations, and this is already a popular model in other countries, like China. Even Kindle can adopt this model by instantly examining how far the reader is in a book. We can also collect objective “customer feedback” by knowing how many readers are currently reading a book, and how many chapters they’ve finished. These are technically realizable.
In summary, I believe that authors deserve to be paid. Amazon’s free promotions are doing no good to the health of the publishing world, be it Indie or Traditional. Nor is their Kindle Countdown Deals (http://fionarawsontile.blogspot.com/2013/12/truth-about-kindle-countdown-deal.html). It’s time for a change.
