A Great New Tool for Getting More Book Reviews on Amazon

Of course you need more book reviews, almost every author does. But did you know that if you are doing book review swaps or you're signing up with a bunch of different book review sites, you could be putting your Amazon account at risk. If you want to find the best way to get Amazon reviews and you want better reviews, not just more, this video is for you. Hi, I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers and your host here at Book Launchers tv. Book Launchers is your first choice for all things related to writing, publishing and promoting nonfiction books. Review sites like gemz, Get Authentic Book Reviews and others are great ways to find readers and get reviews for your book. Personally, I've been able to get nearly 100 new verified reviews with Get Authentic Book Reviews in the last year. But that's actually not the service I'm talking about today. Today we're actually reviewing getbooksreviewed.com a community driven platform. A community driven platform to help you earn authentic Amazon compliant reviews. It prioritizes quality over quantity and steers clear of pay for review models. Now we couldn't test it with my books because and this is an important thing for you to pay attention to if you're already using a site like Gemzee or Get Authentic Book Reviews. If you sign up and use a bunch of different review services, you could be putting yourself at risk because when you're using a bunch of services, they can't prevent you from reviewing a book from an author that has read and reviewed your book. And that, although unintentional, would be a review swap. And that is a big no no. So pick a site and stick with it because they will make sure you're not accidentally doing a swap. Since we couldn't use my books because my books are set up with Get Authentic Book Reviews, Sarah, our book marketing expert, used a couple of our clients books to test out with Get Books Reviewed.

What is great about this site is that it is very much geared towards quality reviews. So it's not so much about quantity, it is about quality. You get really high quality reviews for books. Now a lot of these are going to be ethical, honest reviews and they 100% comply with Amazon's community guidelines. Which makes this a little bit different than some of the other book review sites that are out there.

Now. These sites work because authors read books and write reviews. So don't join any of them if you're not an author willing to read and review books to earn tokens and pace your review growth. Basically it's simple. You List your book, earn tokens by reviewing other books. And then spend your tokens to get reviews from other readers by publishing your book in the library for one review at a time. In a sec, I'll show you Sarah's walkthrough. Sarah's our book marketing expert and she's going to walk you through one of the accounts. But I wanted to note something that I think is really cool about Get Books Reviewed. They have this friends and family network feature.

When you sign up for an account, the first thing that you're going to find out is that you can start start with a 20 day free trial. And that free trial is going to enable you to try all of the different features at their premium level. So you can try for free and for either their premium subscription or for their standard subscription. The major difference between the standard account and the premium account is that the premium account gets the opportunity to earn extra bonus tokens. So what happens is every time you leave a review, you earn tokens. You can then use those tokens to post your own book. So the more you're active, the more tokens you're going to earn and the more reviews you're going to get on your own book. And at the premium level, you have the opportunity to earn what's called bonus tokens.

Now, hopefully you already know this, but Amazon does not want your friends and family reviewing your book. They want these reviews to be unbiased. And if Amazon even gets a sniff that you have some reviews from friends, family, coworkers, et cetera, they often will just do a batch removal of reviews and they'll throw some good reviews out with the tainted ones. So avoiding anything that can trigger this is pretty darn important. Now, as an example, we had a client that tried to get everyone in her company to post a review for her book. And Amazon got wise to this and not only kicked a bunch of reviews out, but they started blocking anyone from even posting a review on her book. Now, we'll never know how Amazon knew. We suspect it had something to do with some shared IP addresses, but there was probably other patterns, like perhaps they had shipped to the same address from their Amazon accounts at one point. Who knows? Amazon has a massive amount of data on us. So the reality is that keeping the reviews as far as away from you as possible is really the smartest move. And frankly, it's also smart because your friends and family may not be your ideal reader. And we don't want to mess with the algorithm by selling and getting reviews from people who wouldn't normally buy your genre of book. As an example, you don't want your mom buying and reading and reviewing your book on investing in 401ks when she normally buys and reviews gardening books or books on essential oils. I mean, we don't want our mom messing up the algorithm or getting us in trouble with Amazon. Right. So the Friends and family feature allows your friends and family to support you by leaving reviews for books and then you earn some tokens from their reviews. How cool is that? Okay, so there's a lot more details here, but I'm sure you want to see inside and understand exactly how this works. So let me bring on Sarah's video here so you can see. So once you've set up your account, you'll get into your dashboard, you can set up the 20 day free trial and then pay after that. The good news is that while reviews are not guaranteed, we have tested this with a couple of books and these were books that previously struggled a bit to get reviews through sites like Booksprout and Book Sirens and even through Goodreads Giveaways. We've tried all those things for these books and didn't work to get reviews, but this has allowed us to get reviews for these books. So that's very positive. As I've talked about on other videos, sometimes Book Sirens, booksprout and Goodreads Giveaway are great tools for getting reviews, but sometimes they don't do anything. So these books, these two books that we used, they did not get any reviews from these other sites and we were successful in getting reviews for them through Get Books Review. Okay, once you are set up, you'll get a video that shows how all this works. You'll want to walk through that and go through your preferences, cover your languages, what Amazon platform you're going to be reviewing on, and exclude things you don't necessarily want to get as recommendations for reading and reviewing so you know you're not being shown books that you'll never read. Now, the token log is something important, so I'm going to pass this over to Sarah to explain this piece. Take it away, Sarah.

We have two books that are set up on getbooks review.com this first one is Don't Retire, Graduate, But Building a Path to Financial Freedom and Retirement Any Age by Eric Brotman. So it'll set up, you'll just very easily go to add book when you want to set up a new book. All right, so some of this information that is really handy. There is a video here on how to load that book for the first time and what you need to do. But you're obviously going to put in your Amazon info. So you're going to put in that URL, it's going to fetch that book info. So I'm going to grab an example just in case. Okay, so I grabbed the Amazon URL for self, promote and succeed, and it's going to fetch most of that book info for you so you won't have to do too much manually. Okay, so all that book info has been populated. It pulls in your cover, your book title, the author name, the number of pages in the book. This is important information because this is going to affect how many tokens it costs to list your book in the review library. And then you get to include here how you want your reviews. Okay, so you can offer free download, free PDF review on Audible, review on Amazon, Kindle, or purchasing the paper book for Amazon. So depending on what you're looking for, you can set up the option best for you. You're going to include the price of the book or double check this against what Amazon has and you're going to verify that it has numbered pages and words. The reason they do this, they want to ensure that the review are actually reviewing the book. And so what you're going to do is select a random page within the book and a word on that page just to verify that that reviewer is actually checking. So again, they're checking the review count of the book. So all of that is pretty easy.

Okay, so the book doesn't automatically publish for review, so you have to click edit the book and then go from there. On this book, you can see we already have five reviews for the book that took a little over a month. But again, that pace is determined as much by how fast you accumulate tokens as anything, because you can only get one review at a time and you have to publish your book to be reviewed again. So here's Sarah to explain what you'll need to do when you publish a book.

Okay, so on your book page and when you're loading a book for the first time, it's going to ask you quite a few things. It's going to ask you for the categories, and there's lots of different ones to choose from. You usually are only going to pick one or two and then tags about what that book is like. So well researched makes a great gift, clear and concise, easy to follow. There are options for these tags that you can dig through. You don't need to come up with these yourself. It'll give you lots of different options. You'll probably choose the top five to 10 that are going to most closely resemble your book and then how you want to accept those reviews. And we put all Amazon versions, number of pages, the word count, the price of that book. And then I'm going to go down here to some of the other things that they ask about your book. You're going to post a short summary of this which can also double as your book description. But some of the more interesting things is you're going to talk about what makes this book unique. This is what's going to make it stand out to reviewers is looking at this unique aspect. What is it about your book that is different and unique? There is also a section here where the author can put in their favorite parts or sections. So for this particular book, don't retire or graduate. The whole theme of this book is turning personal finance into semesters or years as if you were going through college. And so you're able to indicate in this section what your favorite part is as the author. You can also include favorite excerpts. So you can use something like your introduction. Or if there's a specific chapter that stands out, you can put that in there so reviewers get an example to review ahead of time. And then also the you can choose books that are similar to this book. So if your book is comparable to other titles, you can include those here so that reviewers kind of know what to expect going into reading that book.

Now, one of the interesting things about what Get Books Reviewed does is not only does it work on the token system, but it enables you to set up bonuses of tokens to entice reviewers. So you can choose zero bonuses, or you can choose to max out the bonuses, or you can look at what would be the median offer for a book like this. So for this book, other books that are similar to this have offered 2,250 tokens. And this is for books that are about 51,000 words in this genre. Of course, if you're not in Kindle Unlimited or you're getting people to purchase the ebook or print book at full price, you may want to offer a lot more bonuses to make up for the that purchase. Now that leads me to note that you can get verified and unverified reviews through this service. You can allow PDF only Kindle Purchase, Print Purchase, or Kindle Unlimited, which impacts whether your reviews show as verified or not. Of course, if someone purchases your book, it will be a verified review, which is ideal. Now, some things have been stirring up challenges with this and similar platforms. Amazon now requires sign in to view reviews and discourages authors from monitoring their own reviews. Amazon wants to prevent authors from influencing or manipulating reviews. Not allowing you to see review links for your book takes away a crucial layer of quality control and delays services like this from catching the few unscrupulous individuals who may enter our network from time to time. I don't know what path they will take, but my preference is that they are compliant with Amazon as humanly possible and maybe give authors the choice to complete compliance versus no choice. But ultimately, we've been very, very happy with this service and love the way tokens are managed so you can get verified reviews of your book and get rewarded when your friends and family read and review books too. Now as Sarah noted, it's really important to nail that piece about what makes this book unique and add comp titles and choose the right reviewer type with the preference of course, to verified reviews. Now if you've tried get books reviewed or get authentic book reviews or Gemsy or any other review service, let us know what you like and what you wish was different in the comments down below. After you like and subscribe to the channel of course, and I'll see you on the next video.