I grew up blogging, I know that sounds strange, but really – there hasn’t been a point in my life since my teenage years where blogging wasn’t a point of my life.  You have to understand that to understand the weirdest, strangest, I can’t really handle it part of being a published author is actually the fact that you can’t really communicate with the people who review your work.

You see, yesterday, I received my first review from a totally random source.  See below:

The blogger in me, the part that has grown up in this world of interactive writing immediately went to click reply on the review to thank her for her kind words.   Then I paused, and thought about it.  Do authors thank every person who reads for their kind reviews?  I had never seen such a thing on amazon or any of the other sites before.  What do I do?

So – I asked MBMulhall, who has pretty much been my go-to-girl for all things book publishing related since she’s already published two fabulous young adult novels.   Her response was this:

So, responding on Amazon is out.  Can I email them and thank them for their reviews?  Nope – because amazon doesn’t show me their email.  So I have absolutely no way of contacting this girl without doing it on Amazon to say, “Hey, thanks for the awesome review”… except… maybe… if I make a blog post about how frustrating it is that I can’t actually contact her and say thanks for the review, yeah!  That’s the ticket!

But then I thought, how many other indie authors come across the same thing?  How do they handle it?

So this post is has two purposes – first off, it’s to thank all people who write reviews of all the authors out there.  You guys are the reason we do what we do.  :)

And second – to ask all the authors out there:  Do you respond to your reviews?  When or why not?