L.A. Times to discontinue book review section

More bad news for authors and publishers who want book reviews in top-tier newspapers.

The Wall Street Journal says that sometime this spring, the Los Angeles Times will announce that it’s folding its highly esteemed Sunday book review section, shown at left, into a new section that will combine books with opinion pieces. That leaves only five separate book-review sections in major metropolitan newspapers published nationwide, down from about a dozen a decade ago.

The reason? Not enough ads.

The article says book publishers in recent years have moved away from buying ads in standalone book-review sections in favor of paying to stack mounds of books in the front of chain bookstores.

Don’t fret, authors. There’s plenty of action—and traffic—over at Amazon.com, and Randy Gilbert and Don Mitchell have figured out how to write book reviews and articles for that popular website to attract  not only more sales for their own books but also more sales leads and even requests for consulting contracts. They expained how they do it during a telephone seminar I hosted called “How to Turn Amazon into a River of Gold (for Authors, Speakers and Consultants).”

Why is this strategy so clever? Let’s say you’re an author who writes books about gardening. If you review other books about gardening, you can position yourself as a gardening expert and link back to your own website where readers can find your book.

Time-consuming? Yes. But the payoff, as Randy and Don explain it, can be huge. 

Here’s the best part. Unlike the 24-hour shelf life of a newspaper, your reviews and articles live on forever. So you work just once and get paid, get paid, get paid, get paid….