Hi,
In support of this guest blogger, as I mentioned in the post intro, I repurposed Jenn's comment into a blog post. I felt she offered some solid points and I still do. Is her post the be-all-and-end-all of advice tips? No - and as she mentions, she simply wanted to share her takeaways.
As Sarah Arrow shares in her comment after the post, she has more experience than Jenn, and found much to agree on (not least, building the audience prior to the sale). Over on Google+, where I shared the post, other more-established authors mentioned a lot of similarities in their experiences too. From my own point of view, I see a lot of what Jenn talks about happening a lot.
There are authors that game the system. There are crappy books that push quality tomes out. There are unethical approaches taken all the time. But this is just by a certain section of Amazon "authors". For the bad ones, there are good ones too - I'm sure this forum is full of many of them.
The point is, it's simply a point of view from someone whose experience resulted in making some discoveries that surprised her. Is it sour grapes? Who knows? Personally, I didn't see it as that - instead, I saw it as a typically blunt Australian point-of-view on something few people talk honestly about.
But nice to see more established authors on a forum not get all high and mighty and call her out for being a "newbie" who shouldn't talk about things she doesn't know. Oh, wait....
