Here’s an excerpt of my first article, to read more head over to the Bookmachine blog.
At the FutureBook Conference 2014, Orna Ross presented a Big Idea to publishing: the new Ethical Author code from the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi). A week later, it was the theme of #FutureChat, where it became apparent that some of the biggest ethical quandaries for authors concern review practices.
What is the ethical author code?
Reviews are a crucial part of any publicity campaign, and sourced in ethical ways, they’re great tools to market your content with. A positive book review can help persuade someone your content is good enough to purchase. Multiple complimentary reviews in different places or from different sources assist in making a product memorable. Quotes from reviews make good content on social media and repeated mentions of your title can help make it a trending subject online.
Conversely, bad reviews can undo your other marketing and publicity efforts. But surely even a bad review is not an excuse for an author to stalk or commit acts of physical violence against the offending reviewer, right? Wrong. [READ MORE]