Every time a person reviews a book an author does a dance. Some might go full on tango with a rose in their gob and others an uncomfortable shuffling dad dance, but they all do it. Seriously. Picture that every time you give a book a 5* review. On large book selling sites reviews have become that important.
Buying/renting and reading a book is well the best thing anybody can do but the below also hep:
Rating a book is good.
Rating a book and saying why you liked it is great.
Rating a book, saying how it made you feel or doing a critique of it is blinking awesome.
If you read comicbooks, special interest books or publications by small publishers this becomes even more important. You become a warrior fiercly protecting the fiction you love by telling others why it is great and how they could love it too.
If you don’t, who will?
What else can you do? Social media. It costs no money to setup a basic blog. Once you have something publicly accessible you can link to your aposts, even tag the authors. A surprising number of authors will retweet and/or thank you for a review. Some even respond kindly to negative reviews (I have no idea how).
Nothing I’ve said here takes any money and not a great deal of time and effort. Be enthusiastic, find your voice and make a difference.
Oh and finally if you think using a library doesn’t count you’d be surprised. There are schemes that mean authors get paid for each lend. When I was young the only access I had to books was through our local library. Sometimes I had to beg them to order a book in for me. Once there other people could read it to and that is why a library is a great community resource and one we can’t culturally afford to lose.
I’ll get down off my pulpit now and go read something, then I’ll write about it. Promise.
Tony's Thoughts 