Sandy Nathan's YOUR SHELF LIFE

Lady Grace, Book II of Tales from Earth’s End will be officially launched on May 1, 2012. We at Vilasa Press think you’ll be as pleased with the book as we are. We’re

planning gala launch activities, including free books and who knows what. We’ll be announcing the details here. Information about the book follows. You can also read more on Sandy Nathan’s website.

Talk to readers about self-published books or books produced by independent publishers and you’ll almost always hear the same thing: Their quality sucks. We’ve all bought them: abominable self-published books. We can complain about them forever. But how can we guard against them? I have two ideas that may separate the cream from the dreck: contest wins and star ratings on major review sites. It’s difficult to win book contests. I spell out how difficult. As a consumer, you should feel somewhat confident in buying prize winners. Reviews on major sites are a good guide. Believe it or not, not all good reviews come from friends and relatives. Here are a couple of sites where the requirement all books listed must have a minimum star rating of four stars on at least 10 reviews.