Guest Post: Traditional versus self-publishing

I was fortunate enough recently to be offered the chance to guest post on book reviewer Jera's Jamboree blog, talking about the my experiences with both traditional and self-publishing. The link below will take you to the post.

http://jerasjamboree.com/2013/10/21/jeras-jamboree-guest-author-dean-crawford-published-vs-self-published/


In other news, Holo-Sapiens is nearing its beta-reader stage. Structural edits are almost complete and I'm now working on dialogue, character, prose and narrative, ironing out smaller errors and generally polishing the novel.

Eden remains high in Kindle's Paid rankings, despite the efforts of a "sock-puppet" reviewer in the USA ( a sock-puppet is a reviewer account operated by a rival author or somebody close to them ) who placed a negative review of Eden, false accusations and repeated links to said rival author's novels in an attempt to derail my sales and promote their own. I've reported their activity and evidence proving their link to the rival author to Amazon. In a quirk of fate and what I like to think of as justice, Eden shot up over a thousand places into the Top 700 after the review appeared, which just goes to show that crime doesn't pay.

I hadn't encountered this kind of behaviour before, and as the 'review' contained some quite offensive remarks I felt compelled to reply to it as well as report it. This led to the 'reviewer' hastily altering their comments and removing their links in an attempt to avoid any action by Amazon. If there's a next time, I'll know better.

( UPDATE: Amazon have removed the offending review as it was indeed in breach of their rules. )