Getting Book Reviews with Booksprout and Booksirens

Book reviews. You know you need them. But constantly asking people for reviews gets old fast. As an author, thankfully there are some great review sites that will accept a small fee in exchange for promoting your book to people who will write reviews of your book. Two such sites that we use all the time at Book Launchers are Book Sirens and Booksprout. But you might be wondering which site is better or which one you should use if you're looking for more book reviews. And you should always be looking for more book reviews as an author. And then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book Broad. I'm an award winning author and the author of the number one overall best selling book, More Than Cash Flow. And I'm founder of a fabulous self publishing services company called Book Launchers. At Book Launchers we help authors write a no boring nonfiction book. Then we edit and design it while also working with the author to market that book publisher. Post launch we do a ton of work pitching you to get podcasts, live appearances, media and so much more to get your book into readers hands. But this work isn't as successful if your book doesn't have book reviews. So that's where some sites like Goodreads, Netgalley, book sirens and BooksPro come in. Now we've talked about all these sites before in this video on paid book review sites and this one on what worked to get reviews for self publish and succeed. But today I want to focus on the difference between Book Sirens and Booksprout, which are two really good book review sites that you can consider for your book. So let's start with Book Sirens. Here's their site. Now while we're looking at it, let me address the one concern that always comes up when I talk about paid book review sites. Amazon explicitly says you can't pay someone to review your book. So why isn't it a violation to use these services? Readers are not compensated, incentivized, nor required to leave a review. They are also not influenced to leave a biased review. Readers simply use these sites to discover review copies and in exchange for the free read, they leave honest, voluntary reviews. The fee you pay isn't to pay the readers, it's to pay the service to promote the book to the readers that they have spent time and money collecting into a database so that you have an audience for your book. So as you can see by Book Siren's website, there are a few different ways to pay and play with their service. So typically for a nonfiction book, I would Recommend Using the $10 plan with the $2 per reader option. The reason I say this is because we have found the service to be really hit or miss as far as whether your book will get reviews on their site. Nonfiction books cover so many categories and your niche might not be in there. Take Krissa wu's book Woo Them to Heck yes. For Wedding Photographers. This is a specific book and it's going to hit really well if you're a wedding photographer looking to build your business and get great tips. But that reader probably isn't sitting on book Sirens anxiously awaiting her book to review. Contrast that to a book like Live Free and Finding Grace on 48 A Journey to Healing and Self Discovery atop New Hampshire's White Mountains by Linda Magoon, which is a memoir about her divorce, rediscovering her love of hiking in the White Mountains while she rebuilt her life. It's going to be a lot easier for her to find a reader to read and review her book on Book Sirens than it is for Carissa to find wedding photographers to read and review her book. So how it works on Book Sirens Again, because we're talking to nonfiction authors here, I'd recommend you do the promote plan, but it is cheaper if you do a prepaid year so you submit your book for consideration. You get billed a one time fee of $10 per book. If they accept your book and they do not accept every book, I can speak to that directly as Self Publish and Succeed was not accepted will send them Self Promote and Succeed, which is coming out soon and we'll see what happens. But I suspect if Self Publish and Succeed wasn't accepted, the even more niche Self Promote and Succeed won't be accepted. If you are accepted, they'll promote your book for three months to their community of readers, focusing on those who are most likely to read and review your book. These readers browse the website and get emails sent directly to them with selections. When someone downloads your book, you pay $2. Readers can click on your book as much as they want, but you only pay if they decide to download the full book file for reading. Also, you're not paying readers for reviews. Instead, you're paying book sirens to find those readers from their website. They say 75% of books downloaded get a review, but this does vary book by book. That's their overall average. You can also invite readers to join your review team by sharing a simple link. And you don't pay for readers who download your book from your link. You can limit how many downloads you have and you can cancel at any time on book Sirens, you have the option to have readers request your ARC for approval to so you can control who is getting your book. This is like NetGalley. If you go direct through NetGalley, it allows you to review a reader's history and have more control over who gets to download your ARCs. So if someone clearly hates books about blue flowers and your book talks about blue flowers, you may want to reject the reviewer. Or if you see they have a tendency to harshly review the majority of books, you also may wish to reject them too. Overall, it's a pretty low budget option to test out in order to see if you can get a few reviews. Now, now remember, like any paid review site, if someone posts a review you don't like, you don't get to have it removed. These reviews do not have to be positive, they're honest and unbiased. To have them be anything else would be a violation of the terms and conditions of all the sites, but Amazon in particular. Oh, and you might be wondering, speaking of Amazon, where do these reviews appear? Well, it used to just be Goodreads or Amazon, but now you can request reviews be posted to Kobo, Apple, BookBub and Google and as of May 2023. So that's pretty awesome. Go Book Sirens. Also, if you're publishing many books in a year, that prepay option might be cheaper. But again, that's more of a fiction author than a nonfiction author as most of us take the better part of a year to write a book, let alone trying to get multiple nonfiction books done in a year. All right, so that's Book Sirens. Now how does that compare to Booksprout? Well, booksprout is month to month in their plans. As you can see here. They are quite similar to Book Sirens but. But the month to month means you are paying whether someone downloads your book or not. But you can cancel if you don't get results. And they do have a 30 day money back guarantee. So if you're really not happy, you can get your $9 or $29 back. All right, so a few things that are included in their top tier choice is that they have default review disclaimer which you can remove, which means that you can remove their book sprout branding. Not a big deal for most of us. You can also create endless review campaigns to try to get as many reviews as possible for your book unrestricted by a time limit. But obviously if it's unrestricted, you have to keep paying them as long as you're running that campaign. And then they also have the option to restrict review campaigns to their manually vetted top reviewers, which isn't quite the same as book Sirens where you can accept or reject, but these are the booksprout's best reviewers, so they're less likely to just go off and post a really bad review of your book. They also allow you to get reviews for audiobooks, which is really exciting. This is something not available on Book sirens right now, although I am sure they'll add it in the future because audiobooks are so huge and getting bigger every day and getting reviews specifically for the audiobook format is so important. In fact, if you've listened to Self Publish and Succeed and posted a review on Audible, let us know. And if you haven't posted it but you've listened, please post one and let us know so we can send a thank you. It is something that is very difficult and you have to actively pursue audiobook reviews because the Amazon reviews don't translate over to Audible. So being able to get reviews for an audiobook is a great feature here. And they also don't have an acceptance process, so you sign up and you're good to go. We have found the site to work really well for some books like Self Publish and Succeed, but not for others. And that is just how it goes for these kind of programs with nonfiction books. The good news is the cost of testing it as far as time and financial investment is minimal. And if you're a Book Launcher's client, well, we're doing all that for you and a whole lot more so you don't have to worry about this. Do you have other paid review sites for nonfiction that you use? Let's chat about it in the comments below. After you've subscribed to the channel, turn the notifications on and clicked that thumbs up button. Of course. Now here's the video on what worked for Getting reviews for Self Publish and Succeed, and here's the one on NetGalley reviews. Both are great and I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy, so click on over. I'll see you there.