Writing Tip Wednesday: The Best Way to get Book Reviews

It’s the bane of our existence, at least, for us authors. We need book reviews. After all, sites such as Bookbub won’t even consider our books for promotion unless we have a good number of reviews (at least ten to twenty). But how to get those reviews?

First, definitely ask your friends to leave honest reviews of your books. The worst that could happen is that they’ll say no. No big deal.

Apart from that, where should you direct your limited energy, if your objective is obtaining honest reviews of your books?

Book Bloggers

The answer is book bloggers. Identify bloggers who review books in your genre, and ask them nicely if they would be willing to review your book.

How to find them? I’ll make that easy for you. Remember when we talked about how great of a writing resource Reedsy is? Head over to this link, and you’ll see that Reedsy has already done the research for you. Search for Reedsy’s list of book reviewers in your genre, and contact those bloggers. Set a goal of contacting three to five a day. When you’re done with Reedsy, Twitter is also a good resource. You can follow book bloggers on Twitter and add them to your reviewer list to make the organizational work easier.

When you visit a book blogger’s website, make sure to read the review policy first, which will tell you the genres they accept, how to contact them, what information to submit, etc. If they are not currently accepting reviews, bookmark the site to check back later. If you don’t see a clear way to submit a review request, contact the blogger via email, Facebook messenger, or Twitter to ask them if they are currently accepting review requests. If they’re not, thank them and be on your way. Don’t pressure them. Most book reviewers are inundated with requests and have a long backlog of books to read.

After you submit your review request, create a tracking file (I use Excel for this) and log the name of the site and reviewer, the date you submitted a review request, and the book you asked to have reviewed. That way, you can follow-up if need be.

This article from Reedsy has more great advice on contacting book bloggers, particularly regarding how to pitch to them. I’ve found, however, that many book bloggers streamline the review request process by using a Google form for authors to submit, which makes it even easier.

Amazon Reviewers

Another great way to get book reviews is to contact and pitch to top Amazon reviewers. This is a LOT of work. First, get the list of Amazon top reviewers here. Second, most top Amazon reviewers do not include their personal contact information in their Amazon reviewer profiles because they are inundated with review requests. Third, Amazon reviewers review all sorts of products, not just books. To make this work, you’ll have to comb through the list of top reviewers to get those reviewers who 1) have listed their personal contact info or website in their profile; and 2) review books in your genre.

As an example, I just searched ten Amazon reviewer profiles, and only one of them listed a website. And none of them appeared to review books.

For these reasons, I think it’s a better use of your time to contact book bloggers (who only review books!) before considering contacting Amazon top reviewers.

NetGalley

NetGalley is another great resource for authors to obtain reviews. Authors can pay a monthly fee to have their books listed on NetGalley, and readers download the books that they want (for free) and leave reviews on sites such as Goodreads and Amazon. Readers are not required to review books, however, so there’s no guarantee that authors will get a return on investment here. And NetGalley is not cheap.

One final word: Do not pay for reviews! Do not pay sites such as Kirkus Reviews for a book review. Readers know that these paid-for reviews are insincere. An honest 3-star review is way better than a 5-star review from a site such as Kirkus.

That’s it for today. Hope that is helpful!

Authors, let me know how you got book reviews in the comments!