Big News!
Later this month, I'm going to self-publish three m/m novels under the pen name Alex Gabriel. Two of the novels may look familiar to you, though they've been thoroughly overhauled; they're "Learning How to Lose" and "First Contact". One is brand spanking new, and is called "Love for the Cold-Blooded, or: The Evil Minion's Guide to Accidentally
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the website is clean and easy to navigate. a few suggestions:
1. include a word count (to the nearest thousand). readers are getting more particular about price vs word count, and as some publishers pad books with excerpts to make them look longer, a word count is useful info for readers.
2. i'd drop the ratings, it's too fanficcy. the blurb or tag should state that the book has erotic content, or say it at the top of the books page. if you write something sweeter in
future, have a separate section. i had a page for m/m and one for m/f, i've seen similar for erotic romance and sweet romance. just don't have ratings!
3. personal preference here, but i don't think the 'in a nutshell' things add anything. all the info a reader needs should be in the blurb. maybe move the 'nutshell' stuff to the main books page, as the 1-2 sentence blurb looks very sparse. they're fine as teasers but that page needs more imo to entice a reader, so consider moving the nutshell info to there.
4. consider including an excerpt on the blurb pages.
5. readers like ~insider info, so consider having a few blog posts about the background/inspiration etc to the books.
review sites: unfortunately the one i reviewed for closed down last year and there isn't one major m/m review site anymore :/ the biggest review site is dear author; they have monthly promo posts open to all. check some m/m reviews on goodreads, often the reviewers write for a specific site e.g night owl or long and short of it, they usually have links to those sites.
really glad you've done this and looking forward especially to the revamped first contact!! (apologies for any typos, typing on my crappy phone and long comments are almost impossible to manage)
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Heh, yeah, sadly Tom Catte occured to me too late. Maybe I can write something completely different that under the name at some point. It'd be a shame to let it go to waste! *g*
Too bad about your review site... I know about Dear Author and several others, and have applied to the goodreads m/m romance group's reviewing program. I'm going to look for additional sites by checking out goodreads reviewers as soon as I get the chance!
Thank you for being so encouraging, too; I'm trying to be all cool and collected about it all, but it doesn't always work. ;-)
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