Monday 7 March 2016

Reader backlash leads to a new cover design for our book Procurement At A Crossroads

Maybe my mother was wrong?

But she couldn’t be! I mean she always said that everyone liked me!

Have I been living under the false premise of a mother’s biased and blinded love?

Oh well . . . at least the Easter bunny is still real . . . right?

Okay, so what is this all about?

As you already know, Kelly Barner and I teamed-up to write what we believed was a good (alright great) book.

All of the early reviews were solid, with genuinely positive feedback from everyone who had read our book.

Then, on March 4th, the following review appeared on our Amazon page.

Book Review 1

You will have to click on the image to zoom in to read it in full, but basically the reader wrote; I do not recommend this book at all. Seems to go on and on about something that they could have covered in a single chapter. Missed opportunity to highlight Coupa positively and instead only focuses on negative aspects based on women’s profiles at the company.

While Kelly was a little concerned with receiving our first negative review – remember she is the nice one – I, on the other hand, loved it. Okay, she loves it a little bit too, but is more reserved than I am.

What is important to remember is that we were never seeking consensus from readers. We wanted to stimulate meaningful debate, and yes, stir things up a little.

While we will leave the infomercial type coverage to the Gartners and similarly inclined bloggers i.e. our missed opportunity to highlight Coupa positively, it is the reference to the women’s profiles that is most interesting to us. By the way, the offending text appeared on page 18 of the book – now you can jump to that page right off the bat.

So why is this so interesting?

Because despite reading the remaining 283 pages, this section left such an impression on the reader so as to warrant its inclusion in the review. This is exactly what we were going for.

We of course immediately shared this review on Twitter, prompting another reader to Tweet the following comments:

Book Review Comment

All this being said, similar to the sentiment that there is no such think as bad publicity, I also believe that all reviews – good or not so good – are great, because it means our writing prompted someone to take the time to honestly express their feelings.

In the meantime, and for the sake of ensuring that you can indeed tell a book by its cover, we have submitted the following new cover design to our publisher. Based on the reviewer’s comments, we feel that it might best align with their perception of what our book is about.

Romance Cover

PS . . . we have also added a new hashtag for the book #procurementromance

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from Procurement Insights http://ift.tt/1YnxCon
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The views expressed in this post and throughout the series are the autor's own and not intended to reflect the views the YQ Matrix platform, its users or any associated organisations.

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