That said, I should say that a Super User is not necessarily Oprah (though she’s one with massive reach AND influence)… all you need to be a Super User is to have more followers than the average, and a good amount of trust flowing your way. This is why helping to find and create Super Users is vital to the weblit community: even small spikes can do a lot of good.

For a writer, a good reviewer is invaluable. There have been a few sources of reviews in my life that I have grown to trust. It used to be NME (New Music Express, a weekly music rag) and currently it’s Total Film. Of all the movie mags out there, I have found they have very similar tastes and attitudes to myself. The result is that I have watched and often purchased films I’ve never heard of before purely because they gave it a 4 or 5 star rating. I have yet to be disappointed, so this trust gets stronger.

The Utopia would be to have a Super Reviewer. Someone with a big following who’s views are trusted by their followers. A Super Reviewer with 5000 followers would have a significantly larger take up rate than any Super User with 20000 followers.

Long term as a writer you are looking at the ultimate goal of your name being considered a quality brand. Your ideal position is where people buy your next book purely on the basis of liking your previous work. On the assumption that each new book is as good as or better than the last, this in itself will have a compounding effect on your fan base. Each new book brings new readers and solidifies the loyalty of existing ones. Eventually you might reach the Dan Brown Event Horizon where you’ve sold a million copies of your next book before you’ve even written it.

In a completely indirect way, what I’m saying is that the above speculation is a closed system based on each book you release as an individual entity, exclusive of anything else you’ve written. Each new book you write creates more awareness of you and your work and shifts the % uptake. Also, each new book has an impact on the uptake of your previous work.

Finally, how many is enough? What the figures don’t take account of is the point where media gets involved. Once a book is being talked about by enough people, it will gain media interest – maybe be mentioned, maybe reviewed in a mainstream publication (newspaper or magazine, etc). At this point you take a massive step up the exponential curve. The question is how many people is enough for this to happen? Or is it just the right ONE person to take note.

In the end, it’s a question of recognizing that not all WOM is made equal, and that it’s still in your best interest to seek out the Super Users to help you boost the effectiveness of your campaign. Depending on your friends to spread the word is a recipe for disaster.

In the end, word of mouth is just like any other type of marketing: hard work and being constantly on the ball.

http://weblit.us/reviews-listings-guides

WebLit.us is trying to draw in readers to help promote all sorts of, well, WebLit. We’d love reviewers to list here. I’m sure something like a blog with a regular review feature would be acceptable to list there. it would draw readers to sites and would also draw writers to those reviewer sites, and writers could link them… etc. It just takes a little momentum to get things rolling! Posting in the Web Fiction Guide forums that you have a review site would probably help as well. (‘You’ being whoever wants to be a reviewer.)

It’s also expected that quite a lot of reviewers are also going to be WebLit writers, and I think that’ll help everyone when it comes to trusting each other and building up a network. We’re all here to help each other, after all. My traffic is probably going to be your traffic after a reader leaves my site after the most recent update, and vice-versa.

I’ve noticed a fear of centralization amongst some self-pub authors, and it’s really a shame, because ‘centralization’ and ‘community’ kind of go hand in hand. On the internet it’s hard to have one without the other. If a reviewer pulls a lot of readers and manages to give writers a lot of hits, that starts a sort of centralization. The reviewer’s opinion does its own job of vetting. But on a micro scale, this is done every time a reader does not like a story and tells their friends to avoid it. With the advent of blogging and Twitter, those readers have a pretty wide scope to affect the story’s future readership with. We’re already being reviewed on a micro scale – the macro is not nearly so daunting when you consider that.