I've been reading a book about promoting e-books (I'll blog more later on how to sell a million e-books by John Locke) and one thing he said seemed fairly straightforward: - make sure you have some good reader reviews in the beginning of your e-book. It puts readers in the right mood to enjoy your story.
So, I went and collected some kind words that readers had posted about my books (modest cough!) and cut and pasted them into the front of the book that I was editing. The stars vanished. So, I wrote by hand, 4 stars. It means the same, I know four out of five stars means the same, but words just don't have the same impact as a row of stars - I so wanted to see stars.
Well, I finally worked out how to get the image of stars into your e-book to show off your reader reviews. This is how I did it.
1. Collect your reviews and paste them into a Word document. The stars will show as pretty stars.
2. Format the document until it looks pretty.
3. Press the 'print screen' button on your computer.
4. Open the programme 'Paint' which is loaded free on most computers. It hides in accessories.
5. Save that document as a JPEG.
6. Open the JPEG in Picture Editor - or whatever software you use. Picture Editor is the free default one that comes with Office.
7. Select 'edit picture' and crop away all the edges that contain a photograph of your toolbars etc.
8. Resave the cropped photo.
9. Paste as an image at the beginning of your manuscript.
10. Lock the image in place by clicking on 'In line with text.'
11. Ta da! Reader reviews with pretty stars.
It's probably better not to resize the image - I made mine larger after pasting it into the text, and have since noticed that it looks strange in a couple of readers, so I'll have to enlarge the document, then go through the above steps as well. The text hasn't been updated on Amazon yet (or it hadn't last time I looked) so check it out on Smashwords if you want to see how it looks.
A Change of Heart on Smashwords
Hope this is useful.
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