Recommended… recommendations

Here’s a post I made in November over at One Handed Writers. I thought it worth re-posting here both because I hope it’s useful to readers, but also because I’m genuinely interested in hearing about any more sites and services people are using to help them find the good stuff.

§

Publishing has changed. Dramatically.

Not so long ago, the only real routes to publishing were through the commercial companies’ slush piles, or with a few small and medium indie firms that had mastered the complexities of print, design, distribution, and so on.

But now? Everything so much easier! In lots of ways this is good: in the last couple of years we’ve seen massive successes for writers who, for a variety of reasons, have been overlooked or abandoned by trade publishing. These writers have gone it alone (or, more realistically, they’ve bought in expertise in editing, design and all the other publishing specialisms), taking their work directly to distributors like Amazon and Apple.

One consequence of this has been an easing of quality control and for the reader this poses the problem: how do we identify the good stuff in all this noise?

One mechanism that’s emerged is a number of recommended reading services, making use of blogs, Facebook and other social media to alert readers to titles they’ve identified as worth recommendation.

Have you made use of these services? If so, I’d love to hear from you.

Here are a few of them:

Probably the best of them all is What To Read After 50 Shades of Grey, run by the fabulous Summer Daniels. This one has around 75,000 followers on Facebook and posts several times a day.
Korner Kafé Exposed is another Facebook page with a good number of followers, posting regular erotica and romance recommendations.
My own All I Want… started off last Christmas, as All I Want for Christmas, but its popularity persuaded me to keep it going with a slight name change to make it less seasonal!
Dangerous Dirty Delights is another I use regularly.
And then there are lots of groups on Facebook where readers and authors highlight new work, including Romance Novel Junkies, Hot Reads, The Erotica Zone, XtraOrdinary Romance and more, not to mention sites like GoodReads, and all the Twitter feeds (@kindlespice is a good one).

I’m sure I’ve missed lots of good recommendations sites here – why not add details of others in the comments for this post, so we end up with a more substantial list of, erm, recommended recommendations services?