Tuesday 1 November 2016

Nayu's News #227 Review related announcements

 
Hi everyone! Today I've got some important mostly review related notices for you. Firstly apologies for the sporadic posting. I have a whole load of reviews that need scheduling, but The non notices are that the start of the week I was reacting to the flu jab, and the end of the week I had a 24 hour thing from a family member which my body of course took a few days to get over, because it likes to take it's time with germs.Then on the 1 day I wasn't too peaky my laptop didn't like the internet, so at least I was able to write the post just not post it. That's my life!

Amazon

I guess you may think I'm boycotting Amazon, but I'm not. I boycott Nestle and Tesco – you don't want me to get on that soapbox, trust me), but being a homebody and finding shopping difficult the internet is wonderful, and Amazon spectularly so. Unless you are writing reviews. 

There have been some changes to Amazon review policy. With limited time each week I don't have the time to research the current change in detail, so I looked at a few articles to understand the gist of it. I was thoroughly confused because I'd managed to pick conflicting opinions on what the changes to reviews mean, whether it affects book reviewing or not. So for now, unless any of you can point me in the right direction of what the new policy really means I am no longer placing my reviews on Amazon.

I'm really sorry, but given that I have little energy and little time, if my review is going to be removed from Amazon there is no point in me putting it there. I know how important the reviews are to authors, but I have to save my own energy as much as possible, and it's easiest just for me not to put the review on Amazon..


Sainsbury's Entertainment

Some of you may have noticed that several of my book reviews are courtesy of Sainsbury's bookshop (so very awesome!). Unfortunately Sainsbury's has decided to focus on it's shops offline (& grocery shop online), so the book/music/movie/possibly 1 other product online store which came under the umbrella of Sainsbury's Entertainment is no more. 

You can find the full details here, which includes what happens if you already have a book/album/film with Sainsbury's. If the deadlines haven't passed then for either the music and/or the films you can get a refund, books won't be refunded but I think there's something about transferring them to a Kobo account. 

I'm accepting my books are disappearing as I don't have the energy to look into a Kobo account when all I use is a Kindle account for my ebooks. I'll simply buy the books if I want to read them – all the books were for review, so were technically free hence why I'm not planning on spending energy sorting out Kobo.Yes even loading an app uses my energy, so I have to be selective about what I do.


My social media accounts

Not that kind of tweeting...
I've saved the good news until last! I hate to end on a negative note in reviews and the same is true for blog posts. I'm playing around with Hootsuite, which is why the latest posts have had 'new post alert' preceeding the title on Twitter ad Facebook. Hootsuite automatically puts links up for my posts which saves me heaps of time. Unfortunately it means that my usual style of Tweet and FB update style which tries to tag the author and publisher currently isn't happening for the autoposting. 

I'm thinking of a way to fix that, which will involve drafting the Tweet/update prior to the review, then adding the link on the review day. This may defeat the issue of me using Hootsuite, but it may just work. Or I'll simply put 2 notices up, the generic Hootsuite notice as soon as the post goes live (or within the 6 hours period I told Hootsuite to check for blog updates) and the more specific Tweet/update when I've enough energy to email the details to the publicist/author. 

Please bear with me as I figure this out in my usual slow fashion.

That's it for today's notices, I hope you are enjoying the week, having a more stable internet connection, and start the week with a smile! 
Seeing Sora from Aikatsu means I definitely will watch it today!



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