Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

Random House employed Zogby International to do a survey of over 8000 readers. Only 15% of the readership seems interested in ebooks which is good for the brick and mortar retailers. Other interesting tidbits:

Most readers buy by the cover (no surprise).
Nearly half of readers shop at independents.
66% percent of online purchasers buy from Amazon versus 10% from Barnes and Noble.
62% browse online for books with 31% depending on online reviews.
60% rely on suggestions of family and friends and 49% on book reviews.

The entire survey and results can be read here.

Via Teleread.

A group of fantasy loving readers started Twisted Kingdom to review books in the fantasy, science fiction and paranormal genres. Thursday, TK will see a relaunch with a whole new look. Readers who are looking for a heads up on what to buy (like we need any help with that) might want to head over later this week to see what’s new.

Today is Tuesday, but a relatively unimportant Tuesday. It’s the middle of the month Tuesday where readers, full of gluttonous spending a couple of weeks ago look around bewildered at the bedside table, nearly buckling under the weight of books to be read. Some books have been there since many Tuesday release dates ago, but haven’t yet been relegated to under-the-bed status and thus are still in the running to be read within the next, oh, couple of months.

Avid readers (and I am not simply referring to Keishon of the same blog name or whomever uses the moniker at Amazon) are identified because they exhibit the similar character traits. If we put these readers out in the wild, strange but noticeable patterns would develop. ARs, as opposed to ORs (occassional readers - not to be confused with OpRs which are Oprah Book Readers) or RRs (recreational readers) or even SMDRs (subject matter dependent readers), have distinctive traits which separate them from the other reader species. ARs are often hoarders, gathering up books with no intention of reading them until a) they read their other 700 books in the TBR …

Seems pretty miniscule but Yahoo only accounts for 3% of the referrals. The Market Sentinel points to the increasing voice of the consumer via the consumer’s ability to rebrand products.

Via Market Sentinel.

Erika is taking an author Hiatus during Karen Marie Moning’s hardcover series. Anyone else?

First off, here’s my ebook tip of the day: Penguin hates ebook readers. Still no sign of Nora Roberts’ Valley of Silence.

Last Monday, I blogged about a seemingly innocuous topic: websites and my opinion that all authors should have a professional looking one. Some authors believe that websites are unimportant in terms of overall capture of readership because of the low numbers of readers online. When I look at how DearAuthor has grown since its inception and the numbers of other blogs and websites, I believe that online presence is growing larger.

All About Romance averages 2 million unique visitors in 2005. That’s up from 1.7 million visitors in 2004. That’s alot of visitors.
The Smart Bitches average 1,417 visitors per day.
TheRomanceReader logged over 500,000 visitors in 1998. I am not sure what their growth has been since then, but I would imagine that it hasn’t decreased.

Here at DearAuthor, we have experienced tremendous growth, averaging just around 150 readers in April and growing to averaging over 750 for the month of October. On Mondays and Tuesdays, we have our …