review swaps and cross promotion

[drewavera]

Hello, my name is Drew and I write scifi and urban fantasy. As a self published author we tend to measure our success in milestones (sales, reviews, rankings, etc). I've noticed that some people have more difficult times than others with some aspects of the "business" and wanted to offer up .037 cents of help. I love scifi with a passion and try to share stuff with other people on facebook. I'm part of several groups and I'm starting to share other people's books/stories as well as my own. I'm also trying to build my mailing list and will be sending out book recommendations shortly.
I would propose a few things that might be beneficial to everybody. Id you have a novel or short story in need of reviews then maybe we can come together and read/review that authors work to help them out. The expectation would be reciprocated read/reviews. Also, cross promoting other people's books can be a surprising refreshing take from other people. I can send 10 posts about my book and get a few likes and/or downloads, but if I send 2 about mine and 8 about some other people's books then those other books could get ranked up as well. This isn't a competition, if I recommend an awesome book then that reader will remember that and my recommendations might go farther.
Marketing is a crapshoot sometimes, but it's worth the effort if people want to come togethe rfor the common good. So what do you all think? Do you want to come together and help each other out? It could be awesome. If you have something requiring reviews then please say if it's a short story or novel. Thanks

[Mark]

I'm not sure about review swaps. What happens if A loves B's book, but the B hates A's? I wouldn't feel comfortable lying - in fact I wouldn't do it - nor would I feel comfortable giving another writer (who's trying hard to market books, as I am) a 1 or 2 star review (or even a 3 star one).

Also, how do you feel about vastly different reaches of different authors. Some writers have large followings on social media, others have websites no one visits and perhaps 20 or 30 followers on Twitter. 

[drewavera]

Those are good concerns. I would propose the one's who would review the work below 4 stars discuss it with the author they read and not post the review. A critique on the other hand would not only save face for the author but could also help them fix things that the average reader might review negatively.
As far as authors with larger reaches compared to those with small reaches; I would say this would be a great opportunity for mentorship. If an author has a small following then it only stands to reason they are either new, or don't know what needs to be done to further their reach. I;m not deterred if someone with 10 friends wants to share my book when I have 50 friends to share their book to.
I do think if anything is done in regards to swaps or cross promo then it needs to be organized and not just slapped together. I don't review books with less than 4 stars because I know how it feels to get bad reviews or reviews that make it harder for you to promote using sites like book bub. I do let the author know why. It's up to them what they want to do with it.
Thanks for commenting.

[CaitSpivey]

I've seen a lot of New Adult authors have success by coming together for ebook bundles. Instead of competing with authors who write books similar to theirs, they take advantage of the shared readership and combine their books into one download. I've never done something like this myself, so I'm not sure of the logistics, but that's definitely something that could work well for genre writers too.

[blynchbooks]

I definitely think that the bundle approach would work well - I've seen more than a few romance bundles run all the way up the USA Today best-selling charts.

The tricky part is working out how the money's split, but past that, I think that'd be cool, just as long as you've got a good theme and books that work with it.