The First Ten Focus Group Feedback for The Demon of the Well
Because The Demon of the Well was Book of the Day, some of our most trusted members have carefully looked over the cover, the description, and other aspects of this book as a part of purchase-intent focus group. We then asked each participant in the focus group if they planned to buy and read the book, and why they planned to buy and read the book or not. Their answer to that question and reasons are displayed below. We call this awesome feature The First Ten Focus Group.
Keep in mind, the responses from the members are not reviews. This is purchase-intent focus group which means the participants are people who have NOT yet bought or read your book. A purchase-intent focus group is an important and extremely useful marketing tool for any product, not just books. For other products, you might walk on the street and show people an item in a package and poll them about whether they would buy if or $X or not. These kind of focus groups are one of the ways big marketing companies find the ideal price points for products and test the effectiveness of different packaging. The focus group can help you identify your market so you how to target ads of your book, and it can (but may not) provide you new useful info about your "packaging" (e.g. your book cover, your book synopsis on Amazon, etc.). The point of the focus group comments is to give you information from people who have not bought or read your book about why they plan to buy your book which will help you in marketing the book. These are not reviews or critiques of your book because they are not from people have read the book. This is a marketing tool, not reviews. The trick of book marketing and book advertising is that you have to convince people who have not read your book yet that your book is worth buying and reading. For marketing, it doesn't matter much if people love your book after reading it if you cannot convince potential buyers before they read it that they will love it.
IMPORTANT: Any score over 10% is considered very good. And any score above 0% is acceptable. This is because we only poll about 20 or so readers, and all readers have to say "no" to almost all books. Over a million books are published each year. Even a very active reader cannot come close to even reading 1% of books out there.
This is also why publishing books is such a tough industry.
shravsi
This is the first poetry book I would read until the end. I liked that a legend is being told through poetry, and it catches the attention of the readers. I dig mythology and legends hence this book helped me in dipping my toes in the world of poetry. I did not find any typos within the sample, but I thought the introduction could have been written in a poetic style. That way, the overall mystic nature would have been maintained. If I had not sampled this book, I wouldn't have picked this book thinking of this as a poetry book, but I actually like this now.
First Ten review added on January 17, 2021, at 11:04 pm by shravsi.
Justine Ocsebio
I would’ve sampled this book based on the cover. I like the idea of a story within another story. I also like the idea of telling a story in verses. The combination of rhymes and relatively simple words makes the story easy to digest. Another thing, this was inspired by Persian literature. I believe the book needs to go through another round of editing, as there are a few punctuation errors. Here’s an example: “”Just keep it down” the first one said.” There should be a comma after the word “down”. Regardless, I found the idea fascinating, so I’m going to read the whole book. I disliked nothing. To improve, the author should polish the editing. The official review did not affect my decision.
First Ten review added on January 17, 2021, at 3:32 am by Justine Ocsebio.
Manang Muyang
The title and cover clearly spell fantasy, a genre I don't like much. But the blurb caught my attention. I just had to sample the book. The sample was interesting, but I was not moved to read the book to the end, especially as fantasy stories are not my thing. I got my free copy, though. The book was written in verse, so the author had a lot of leeway in terms of punctuation. However, I still found some comma issues. In the introduction, the author should remove the comma in the phrase "March, 1980 edition of the National Geographic Magazine." Also in the introduction, "And this is when something very strange happened" seems better with "was" rather than "is." In the prologue, the author did not use commas to set off the dialogue tags. The author's recounting of how the book was written was nothing short of fascinating. It almost seemed like magic. The official OBC review gave the book the perfect rating. From the little that I read, I have no reason to disagree. The author may need to address those tiny grammar issues, though, to make the book even better.
First Ten review added on January 17, 2021, at 2:22 am by Manang Muyang.
This book appears to have been Book of the Day more than once. Only responses from the most recent Book of the Day focus group are shown. Older responses have been hidden by default to avoid confusion. If you would like to also view the older first ten responses, you can unhide them by clicking the button below.
Total ~ 100%
The Demon of the Well earned a score of 100%.
In other words, out of the top-level reviewers who read at least the first 10 pages of this book, 100% plan to read the whole book.
IMPORTANT: Any score over 10% is considered very good. And any score above 0% is acceptable.
Over a million books are published each year. Any given person could not even read .0001% of the books out there. This means readers have to be very selective. Even taking the time to look over reviews and blurbs, let alone read samples, is more time than most readers can afford for most books. The First Ten is a powerful focus group that addresses those issues. It creates a helpful tool for authors, publishers, and other readers.
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