Amazon reviews

 Friends, if you have read any of my stories, I'd be most grateful if you can find time to write an honest review on Amazon.

This can make a material difference to the availability of the books.

A while ago, Amazon blocked — removed from publication — my book The Hour Before Dawn, with 'customer disappointment' given as the reason.

The Amazon publishing platform seems to be run mainly by robots; correspondence proved frustrating because we were unable to determine the basis for the customer's disappointment. At all. The only thing forthcoming, no matter how we framed the question, was redirection to a page stating in general all the possible bases for customer disappointment. 

So we were not able to get it reinstated. We did manage to circumvent the problem by re-publishing the same book with a different ISBN, even though we couldn't include its position in the series. If we'd indicated that it belonged to the Hawk & Dove series, on republication it would have come up not as Volume 5 (which it is) but as Volume 13. So a minor annoyance, but hey.

When we republished it, I put out a plea to anyone who had read it to come and review it, and several people kindly did. I didn't ask for positive reviews, nor would I ever, only for honest reviews.

The first of my Hawk & Dove books was written in 1989 and published in 1990, so it's been around a while! In the course of time it's garnered hundreds of reviews on Amazon. But it's been less than two years since I got back the rights to all my books so we could publish them ourselves under our own Humilis Hastings imprint. Series 2 was always and only under that imprint, but until a couple of years ago Lion Hudson was the most recent publisher to have all the books in Series 1.

The reason I had more than one publisher was because the life span of the series is so long. The first publisher of The Hawk & the Dove and The Wounds of God and The Long Fall was Kingsway in the UK, under their Monarch imprint, started by Tony Collins (my husband) as part of his vision for promoting Christian fiction in the UK. In the US, Crossway took those books, and they were the publishers who did the one-volume book of that trilogy, first in 2000, and then in a new edition in 2012.

But Kingsway stopped publishing books, and became only a music publishing business, so Tony moved to Angus Hudson, taking his Monarch imprint with him, and Angus Hudson merged with Lion to create Lion Hudson. During that time of transition, Crossway was the only publisher for my Hawk & Dove books.

Then, to celebrate that trilogy having been in print for 20 years continuously, I asked Crossway if they'd be interested in a 4th book in the series. They were, so I wrote The Hardest Thing to Do. At the time I was writing mainly non-fiction, but once I re-entered the world of St Alcuins, I just kept writing.

After more stories had been added — The Hardest Thing to Do, The Hour Before Dawn and Remember Me — it seemed like a good idea to seek a UK publisher again, in addition to Crossway in the US. Lion Hudson wanted to take on the whole series, so we did that. Not long afterward, Crossway closed down its fiction department, so at that point all the books were with Lion Hudson, and I wrote three more — The Breath of Peace, The Beautiful Thread and A Day and a Life — all published by Lion Hudson.

Then Lion Hudson went bust, and their publishing programme was amalgamated into SPCK, so all my books, both fiction and non-fiction, more than twenty titles, were now with SPCK.

Then we decided to have a go at establishing our own imprint on the Amazon publishing platform. Years ago, self-publishing was not very satisfactory; the actual paperbacks were not very well-made, not pleasing products, but that has all changed. Nowadays, the books themselves, as objects, are really nice, and because Amazon operates internationally it's easy to get the books to most places around the world. My sales are, for the most part in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia.

While we were waiting (it took a while) to get the rights back from SPCK, I'd added some more stories, and that's why there's a Series 2. SPCK could have refused to return the rights, and I thought it wouldn't be quite ethical to appear to be continuing a series for which they were the publisher. Hence the 2nd series, which has This Brother of Yours, Brother Cyril's Book, A Path of Serious Happiness, and will shortly also have St Luke's Little Summer. After that, there will be one more book in Series 2, which I've started but am a way off finishing.

Because of this long and winding road through different publishers over the course of 35 years, some of these books have a shedload of reviews, while the more recent ones have fewer — or even none (in terms of actual comments). So, for instance, the Lion Hudson edition of The Hawk & the Dove has 347 reviews, the 2000 Crossway edition of the trilogy has 204 reviews and their 2012 edition of the trilogy has 173 reviews.

Meanwhile, the books in Series 2, that were always published by us for Humilis Hastings, each have a healthy amount of reviews. 

But the ones that were published with Lion Hudson then republished by us have few reviews (or none) in the new imprint. For instance, where The Hardest Thing To Do has 196 reviews of the Lion Hudson edition, it has only 4 reviews for our Humilis Hastings imprint edition. And of course, some of the reviews are just stars given, rather than a comment left.

When I started writing, I made a pact with myself and with God that my job would be to write the story and just leave it there. I would never chase sales or promotion, I would do no marketing and build no platform. I believe in the power of the hidden life, and I wanted to offer my work to God rather than to a marketplace as such. So I spend very little time looking at the numbers — I've only looked these things up now for the purposes of telling you about them.

Why it matters to have Amazon reviews divides into two reasons. The first is the simple one that, as happened with The Hardest Thing to Do, there's a risk that Amazon will simply take the book out of publication if it's not protected by good reviews. So if, for example, someone's left an unhappy review because the delivery man left their order on their porch and their dog ate it, and they left that as a product review — one star and bitterly disappointed — that could get the book pulled if there are no good reviews to mitigate their misery. And while I don't want to direct my energy to blowing my own trumpet, I do want people to at least have the chance to read what I've written, because I think it will be helpful for the development of their faith.

The second reason is that comments left by reviewers help people make up their mind if they want to read that book. I always read the reviews before I buy anything on Amazon. That's what helps me decide what to purchase.

So, if you have read any of my books, and feel inclined to leave a review on any of the ones in our Humilis Hastings imprint, that will help to keep them in print and help others to decide if they'd like to read them or not. If you're not sure which ones are our edition, you can see the covers of the Humilis Hastings editions in the side-bar to the right of this post.

Waving to you from England where it has finally stopped raining!