In my last blog post, we looked at some ways you can gather reviews from friends and family, while also being careful not to break your selling platform’s terms and conditions about biased reviews. In this blog post, we will be considering other sources of reviews that you can draw on. These will include people in your network (such as a mailing list, professional reviewers and your readers). Once again, don’t forget that you can only ask for an honest review, not a good one.
However, before we dive into how to get more reviews, we will have a quick reminder of how much reviews can help your book. There are many ways that they can do this, some of which we will consider below.
What are the Benefits of Reviews?
First and foremost, reviews help people looking at your book decide whether or not to buy it. Online selling platforms usually have a star rating or similar, so this will tell potential readers at a glance how well received your book has been. In addition, reviews give people a chance to say what they did and didn’t like about the book.
This may help you in surprising ways, as even negative reviews can improve sales if they are specific enough. If the reason for a negative review is something that a potential buyer likes (for example, a lot of dialogue), then they may well decide to buy the book anyway. Essentially, reviews help buyers make up their minds so that you get readers that like your subject and style of writing.
Having more reviews can also help to elevate your book in the rankings. In general, selling platforms will have an algorithm which places books with more signs of engagement (such as reviews and sales) higher in the search results. This should help to boost your sales, which in turn will increase the number of reviews, increasing your ranking, and so on!
In addition, reviews can also help you to grow as an author. By seeing what readers did and didn’t like, you may be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your own writing. You can then keep (reasonable!) criticisms in mind for when you write another book, or even make some amendments to the existing book if your selling platform allows this.
Who Can You Ask for a Review?
Professional Reviewers
One thing you might like to try is contacting professional reviewers, such as those who appear in magazines and on major websites. The advantage of doing this is that it will generate a lot of publicity for you if you are mentioned somewhere particularly well known. This should lead to more people hearing about your book and buying it. In addition, people will be more likely to trust a review from someone they have heard of, although this does rely on the review being positive or at least appealing to the potential buyer.
On the other hand, contacting professional reviewers may only result in limited success. If the reviewer is well known, they are unlikely to accept books to review from everyone who contacts them or may have the books they will review chosen for them. You will likely be turned down a lot or not receive a response at all. Instead, you could try…
Bloggers
Research what review blogs there are in your genre and try contacting them. Again, they receive a lot of requests from authors so don’t be surprised if you don’t get many responses, just keep trying! Include a short pitch (about a paragraph) that introduces your book and explains why they might like it. State what formats your book is available in and ask which they would prefer. Keep contacting different bloggers even after your book has been released for a while and take the time to contact some new ones every week.
Professional Network
Another tactic you can try is reaching out to your professional network and asking them to leave a review. This network may be a social media following you have built up, which is another good reason to stay on top of your social media pages and use them to help you with marketing. Alternatively, you may ask people on your mailing list if they would be interested in reviewing your book.
You could also ask people in person, for example, if you are part of a writing group. Remember to only mention it once in this kind of situation and not to push people – the last thing you want is to be a nuisance or for them to feel pressured into writing a review.
When you are asking for reviews from your professional network, offer a free copy of your book to anyone willing to review it. Make it clear that this should be an honest and unbiased review, not necessarily a positive one.
Ask Readers
Finally, why not try asking your readers directly if they would consider leaving a review? You can put a call to action at the end of your book, with a link to write a review. Again, this has to be a request for an honest review, not a positive one!
Wrapping Up
I hope that you now have some new strategies ready to get more reviews on your self-published book. In my next blog post, we will be considering writing critique groups and the benefits that they can bring.
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