Edge of Glory Wide Release
Hey Friends,
It started with print books in Ptown, followed by ebooks on the Bywater website, and now Edge of Glory is available everywhere! If you’re those Kindle fans who love the ease of buying your ebooks directly from the Kindle store, or international Prime members who need to buy from the big warehouses to get shipping that doesn’t cost a kidney, your time is now!
And for those of you who have already gotten your copies, thank you! The great reviews are rolling in. And while I don’t ever go looking for them because of feelings and creativity and art for art’s sake and yada yada yada, my publisher does send some along from time to time and asks me to share them, like these from The Romantic Reader who gives the book “5 stars, hell all the stars. I love this book!”
Or Carleen Spry, who says, “ Edge of Glory is, in my very humble opinion, one of the books to read in 2017. In fact, it’s probably one of the best I’ve read in two or three years.”
Or Amos Lassen, who wrote “When that romance comes, it is very special. I can say the same about this book; it is very special.”
I hope that those of you who have read Edge of Glory have had similar responses to the story and characters, because that’s really the goal here. Every time a new books comes out, I sit around waiting and hoping and praying that the story I put so much love and work into will resonate with someone else out there. I’m not going to lie, I love that moment when I finally hear from a reader saying I achieved that goal. I adore getting that kind of feedback from readers, and so far I’ve gotten some really nice notes about this book, but here’s where I have to address one troubling comment has come up three times in the last two weeks. It goes something along the lines of, “I’m not a reviewer, but….”
Friends, Romans, Readers, I desperately need you to know that you don’t have to “be a reviewer” to give valued responses to a book. Authors are happy to simply hear, “I really liked your story!” If you can add a sentence or two as to why, that’s the cherry on top for all of us, but it’s not even necessary. That kind of stuff is soul-sustaining and I don’t want any of my readers to ever feel like they can’t comment on my Facebook, blog, or twitter simply because they don’t have the polish of some of our more established genre reviewers.
What’s more, your simple reviews of, “I really enjoyed reading this, 5 stars!” when posted on Amazon or websites like Goodreads sustain much more than our writerly souls. They sustain our careers. Lots of advanced industry articles have been written on the correlation between reviews and the ways books are promoted on those sites (i.e. ads and bestseller charts and the “if you like this book, you might also enjoy everything Rachel Spangler has ever written” features), but the bottom line is the number of reviews matters . It matters a lot. And for better or worse, ten 5-star reviews that simply say, “I like this book” carry more weight than 2 long, elaborate thesis papers about Virginia Woolfesque prose or the subtle classist work ethic permeating the plot. More positive reviews equals more help to authors. It really is a simple as that.
So I guess I’ve written this entire blog to say thank you for reading Edge of Glory, and if you enjoyed it, I hope you will say just that on whatever review websites you can find because that sort of thing means a lot to authors, in a lot of different ways.
