Traditional Reviews vs. New Media

We have just self-published a very comprehensive guide to the extreme sport of cave diving. www.CaveDivingBook.com A 320 page collection of articles from the sport’s top practitioners, it is selling well. In the first month it has been on the market, dozens of positive comments and reviews have been posted to scuba diving forums and blogs. Yet, the two times it has been reviewed by so-called experts (for diving-related magazines), those reviewers, rather than discussing the content, focused on grammatical errors, photo composition, charts and graphs, and one guy even criticized the copyright/publisher page! We are attributing this to sour grapes and a bit of professional envy, as the reviewers are diving personalities who were not invited to contribute to this project.
Lesson learned: 1. Our satisfied customers are our best critics and reviewers. 2. The only reviews that count are AMZN. 3. Unless the New York Times calls for a copy, we will not supply books to reviewers, we simply don’t need them.
This is a very professionally designed book and Publetariat members are welcome to take a look at:
www.CaveDivingBook.com

Thanks to April Hamilton for steering us here.
Robert