Monday, July 20, 2009

First English Reviews

During the week-end there appeared two reviews of 'Win with the Stonewall Dutch'. I'm fairly busy now and they both speak for themselves so I just note that they both are positive and contain very little if any criticism and give the links:

There are also some comments that come quite close to a review at Thomas Johansson's chess book page (this page opens an ad and at least one pop-up). I will return to this as it raises some questions that deserve to be answered.

I will also eventually have a look at some of the questions raised in this thread at Chess Publishing discussion forum.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Win-Stonewall-Dutch-Sverre-Johnsen/dp/1906454078

Sverre Johnsen said...

Thanks!

I noticed the Amazon review too. Maybe I will write a blog entry on Amazon reviews one of the next days.

Anonymous said...

(not the same anon)
Isn't it standard nowadays that the publisher / manufacturer makes sure an "independent" positive review is posted shortly after release? ;)
Just a general observation, not directly related to your book.

I liked the London book, good luck with the new one.

Sverre Johnsen said...

Dear Another Anonymous,

To some extent I think you are right.

Some publishers/ manufacturers/ authors seem to fall for this temptation. I could point to one fairly recent chess book with some very suspicious 'reviews' on Amazon.com. There are some very good indications that most are written by the same person but it would be impossible to prove anything, so I will stop here.

This suspicion is one reason why I have not referred to these Amazon 'reviews' anywhere. That doesn't exclude the possibility that some of them can provide useful feed-back and there is little doubt that they to some extent influence the sales so I check them occasionally.