3 Kinds of Reviews You Need for Your Book

You already know you need reviews for your book. Reviews are a fundamental puzzle piece to success. But do you know the three different kinds or who you should look for to get them? If you don't know or you're just curious if you've got it right, well, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad, author and founder of Book Launchers. At Book Launchers, we have a full team of professionals to help you write the book, edit, design and lay it out. And probably most importantly, we have a team of marketing professionals that will help you with strategy and the tactical execution of that strategy with ads, pitching, distribution help, and so much more. Sarah Bean heads up our book marketing team and she ran a deep dive training session in March, which was a two hour session going into all the things you need to know about getting book reviews. If you're new here, you should know these sessions happen every month of the year except July and August when we take a little break. They are free to our community, but you do have to be live to learn. We only share replays with our clients. So if you want the best content and you want it free, all you need to do is be on our newsletter list. Book launchers.com newsletter for all the hookups. Gotta earn your money, Dave. You gotta earn your money. Okay, so in March, Sarah did a deep dive on reviews. And I have some excerpts from that session for you today and in an upcoming video as well. So make sure you're also subscribed to the channel with notifications on so you catch the next one in this series. So first she shares the three kinds of reviews. So I'm just gonna turn it on over to Sarah. Take it away.

Three different types of book reviews. And you have probably heard about these in some form or another. The first kind that we're gonna be talking about are endorsements. Then we're gonna get into editorial reviews and then finally customer reviews. And each of these are very different and each serve a different purpose. So we're going to get into each one of those right now. So starting off, we're going to talk about endorsements. Endorsements are those brief promotional quotes that can be used solely for marketing purposes. They're usually one to two lines from a notable figure. And when we talk about notable figures, we're talking about a name that is recognizable to your target audience. These could be authors, academics, business leaders, experts, even celebrities. Right. And, and that is what I think most people think that endorsement has to be a celebrity. But actually, in truth, it is more important that that endorser, that influencer that is giving you these lines for promotion is someone that is recognizable to your target audience. So if you are writing a business book, it would be more ideal to have the CEO or founder of a particular business book or, excuse me, a particular company. If you're writing a book on marketing, maybe the CMO from a company, if you are writing on parenting, maybe it is a parenting expert or another parenting author. It's not as important that you get Adam Sandler to endorse that book. Now, celebrities are very useful when it comes to, for example, if they. I believe it is, I believe it's Jenny McCarthy that is like the face of one of the autism associations because I think her son has autism. I could be misremembering that. I'm not sure if it's Jenny McCarthy, but if it was a book on autism and you got a celebrity that is associated with that topic, that can be a big boon. But you can't all get celebrity. So consider other authors that are writing in your field, academics, professors, researchers, business leaders, experts, you know.

All right, so endorsements give you, in your book, credibility. Essentially, the person giving you the endorsement is lending you their credibility. You put these on your product description page, your website, your social media materials, and of course on your social media, your book will survive and sell even if you don't have these. These are nice to have, but they aren't always easy to get. So if you don't have them, you can still launch your book. One of our authors, Shelley Buck, authored Leave youe Light on and she got some high powered celebrity endorsements for her book through her network because her husband is one of the key people behind the film Frozen. But I mean, if you're not buddies with Kirsten Bell or the CEO of Disney, that's okay. Sarah has another example from one of our clients, Denver Frederick, on the endorsements for his book. So you can see what that looks like.

And here I've got a little example. This is a snapshot from one of our book Launcher clients, Denver Frederick's product page on Amazon. It's in the section called Editorial Reviews. And you can see here Denver's written a deeply credible perspective on what it takes to build movements that create impact at scale. And this is by Jim Collins from the book Good to Great. Denver's book happens to speak to nonprofit leaders on how they could do growth and scale and build better cultures for nonprofit organizations. So it makes sense here that he has Carter Roberts, who's the CEO of the World Wildlife Fund, one of the biggest nonprofits in the world. So you want to get someone that is connected to your topic or is going to be recognizable to that target reader.

Okay, moving on to the next kind of review. Editorial Reviews. Now, I realize it's a little confusing because the screen Sarah showed indicated the endorsement. Reviews appear under the editorial Reviews section on your Amazon product page, but they're not the same thing. Amazon just only gives you one place for them. So even though Amazon only gives you one place for them called Editorial Reviews, just know that endorsements are the thing that lend you credibility based on the name or the title of the person. And by the way, that's only relevant to your reader. That title and that person has to be somebody your reader gives credibility to. Editorial Reviews are critiques. These are often paid for, but can also be things that a journalist or a magazine just write about you and your book. Anyway, I'll cut to where Sarah is diving right into these so you can hear it straight from her.

This could be periodicals, news, you know, like a newspaper, magazines, journalists, and even industry outlets. Editorial reviews are usually going to be comprised of a summary of the book followed by a very short critique. And this is one of the surprises, I think a lot of authors think is that they're going to get 200, 300 words on how great the book is. But what it actually is is a short summary of followed by one to two lines on whether or not that outlet recommends the book, what they get out of it. The purpose of an editorial review is to educate that outlet's audience on whether or not the book is new, newsworthy, what's coming up, what's worth their audience reading. So it is an important thing that you realize as the author, that these reviews are not happening for you. They're happening for that outlet's audience. The author really has no control over what these editorial reviews are going to say. It's at the discretion of the reviewer. So sometimes they can be bad if the reviewer did not agree with that book, and you really have no way of controlling that.

And something to remember, these reviewers are professionals, and they are paid to critique, which means they will find something to critique. Many authors get really down on their project. We even had one ditch her book completely after a Kirkus review came in with one sentence criticizing the flow of her book. And we were all like, wait, the review was really positive. And she still didn't like the fact that it made one comment. And that's what they're going to do. They are reviewers who are paid to critique books, so they're going to find something they think should be changed or made improvements on. I have some other reviews on these kind of services, one being NetGalley, and I'll link to that at the end of this video. But I talked about how these reviews can be a little harsh at times, but you can still use them because you can take excerpts from the reviews and use the positive part of the excerpt. You don't have to use the whole review or any of it at all if it's not as favorable as you would like. It is important to know that libraries in particular, but also bookstores, will often only stock your book if it has some strong editorial reviews from trusted sources like Book List, Publisher Weekly Reviews, Library Journal, or Kirkus. Okay, let's get to customer reviews. Back to you, Sarah.

Customer reviews. Now, these are the ones that are gold. Okay? This is like currency for a book. Customer reviews are the reviews from individuals who purchase the book. Okay, so this is from the standard audience member, someone you know, and you've probably seen this a zillion times on Amazon or any other kind of website. These are on product pages and they're the hardest to control because the author has no say over what the customer is going to say about the book or how many people leave reviews. But these ones are gold because they prove to other customers whether or not they should take a chance on your book.

Okay, I'm going to jump right in here. Jump and say someone doesn't have to buy your book to write a review. Let's say, for example, you commented the day a video is released and you got entered to win some of our noboringbooks swag or a copy of Self Publish and Succeed, and you took the book, you read it, and you loved it and you wanted to write a review because like Sarah said, those reviews are gold. And if you like to give other people gold, especially people who spend their money and time creating free videos for you, hint, hint. Reviews are an amazing gift. So. So thank you in advance. But you don't have to have bought the book. You can go on Amazon as long as you've spent $50 on Amazon at some time in your life and you can still post a review. All right, back to Sarah. She's going to show you another view of Amazon where the reviews show up, not just at the top of the page.

If you are on Amazon, you have seen this section. It's underneath the editorial reviews and the product description. At the very bottom are the customer reviews. And you can see Here, Amazon goes through and indexes elements from each of those reviews. Things like self publishing. Highly recommend, you know, must read. Thank you. So it's taking the words that are most commonly used and putting them together here so that potential buyers can see what is usually included. Book reviews are the social proof of your book. They increase your book's visibility, they influence potential buyers. Book reviews are the things that are going to tell potential buyers if the book is for them, what they're going to get out of reading it, what they may experience while reading the book's quality, its value, and a lot more.

And of course, reviews are also important for findability.

The Amazon's algorithm's job is to help buyers find find the product they're looking for. So buyers go to Amazon and they put something in the search bar and it might say books on wildlife. What the Amazon algorithm is going to do, it's going to look at keywords, genres, book sales, how many downloads, sales ranking, browse activity and reviews in order to put the right book in front of that potential buyer. So the more reviews that you have, the more data you're giving the algorithm to work with. And it's going to put your book in front of the buyers who are actually looking for it. All these things that feed the algorithm are going to be the number of verified reviews, how helpful the reviews are and how new the reviews are. And all of that affects your book's ranking on Amazon. So getting more back into the algorithm, here's a little bit of research that I was able to find. Amazon looks at the number of verified reviews, which means that the Amazon has verified that that person who is reviewing it actually purchased the book on Amazon. Are the reviews new, new reviews less than a month old, and reviews that have been upvoted as factors towards ranking. So you see those bestseller rankings per category, all of the things that sort of influence those rankings are going to be verified reviews, newer reviews and reviews that have been upvoted as helpful. And a 9, which is the one that created the Amazon algorithm, actually says in their documentation about it, products with positive 4 and 5 star and a high volume of customer reviews relative to competing products will rank higher than those with low quality and low volume reviews. So that is directly from the algorithm.

Okay, so now that you know all about the kinds of reviews, I'm sure you have questions like how do I get them? How do I set myself up to get more reviews that are positive? Well, I do have a cool video on what worked for getting reviews for self publish and succeed right here. And this video on NetGalley is also for you. And I hope you subscribe to the channel because in a couple weeks I'm going To Post Part 2 of this video series excerpt from our Deep Dive. So for now, I hope you've subscribed. Hit that thumbs up button and you can head over to one of these two videos. I'm waiting for you.