Is that Shelfbuzz buzzing? Or is that just another hornet’s nest?

And by “excellence,” we mean “how your book looks at first glance”.

Shelfbuzz.com is one of the newer sites promoting free books, and a bit of an oddity at a time when Amazon.com is discouraging websites from doing that sort of promotion. And it does this promotion by encouraging readers to break one of the oldest and wisest adages in the industry: “Don’t judge a book by its cover!”

But that is, in fact, what Shelfbuzz wants users of the website to do. Each day it picks several books from the free listings at Amazon, judged solely on the appearance of their covers. “At Shelfbuzz, we believe that a professional, well-designed cover usually indicates that the author cares enough about his or her book to invest in it.” So if the author has money to pay for high-priced services, their book is obviously better, right?

Think your book has a great cover? Guess what? Shelfbuzz doesn’t care. They just grab them at random from the free listings. They state there are thousands every day, but they only look at two hundred, making it pretty easy for any free book with a “good” cover to slip through their buzzing little wings. You can’t actually submit your book for consideration, like a lot of sites would.

And their CEO is a poodle. Now, anyone who knows me knows I love dogs, but I can’t see putting one in control of a website that’s trying to have some relevance. For a website that’s stressing professionalism through looks, this tidbit comes off as almost annoyingly quaint and unprofessional.

Shelfbuzz also offers “Free Cover Critiques” in which you can send them your cover and they will tell you what they think of it, publishing it on their website. Of course, the shallowness of this process is further enforced by a requirement to tell them how much the cover cost.

Let’s sum things up on Shelfbuzz:

Promoting exclusively free books at a time when Amazon is trying to push actual sales.
You should pay for your cover or your book is crap.
“We are incredibly shallow, as money is always an indication of quality.”

Mind you, some of the covers pictured on Shelfbuzz are very nice. But I know I don’t usually pick what I read by their covers anymore.

Oh, and today’s warning: Readingfanatic.com. This may or may not be some sort of pirate e-book site. However, in order to use it, it wants to install a toolbar to your browser. It only works for IE and Firefox, and when I tried to use it in IE, it crashed spectacularly. Checking the uninstall instructions, it led me to a website telling you how -to uninstall the scammy MyWebSearch Toolbar – an add-on well-known for attaching spyware, malware, viruses and everything else to your system to make your browsing pleasure a nightmare.

My guess is that there’s no e-books involved here … they’re just hoping to ensnare a few unwary readers and worried authors. Avoid Readingfanatic.com!