Readers of my latest Carding novel, Thieves of Fire, have been very generous in their praise on Amazon.com. I consider myself a fortunate writer, indeed.

I wanted to take a moment not only to acknowledge the praise but to let all readers know how very important reader reviews are to a writer and a writer’s career.

You see, reviews used to be the province of the media only, and publishers (and authors) lived and died by what the New York Times or Publishers Weekly had to say about their books. But that was back in the days when the publishing industry was monolithic, and what we now call “traditional” publishing was the only legitimate game in town.

But then Amazon opened up the review process, encouraging its members to voice their opinions about what they read. That’s when the tide started flowing in the readers’ direction, and now the power of reviews lies firmly in their court.

Here’s how this works: The quality of reader reviews (the number of stars given) has a definite impact on sales. How many of us are going to read a book with a one-star review?

But equally important is the NUMBER of reviews. Why? Because they foster links among books. For example, Thieves of Fire has been compared to works by Maeve Binchy and Alexander McCall Smith. The higher the number of Thieves reviews, the more likely it is that searches for books by Binchy and Smith will include links to Thieves.

And the more links, the more likely there are sales.

So if good books are important to you, then you need to support them by writing reviews on Amazon and elsewhere.

On behalf of all writers, thank you for taking the time to support us.