Self Promote and Succeed Chapter 10: The Lifeblood of Every Book — Reviews

Chapter 10 the lifeblood of Every Book Reviews Next to coffee, book reviews are probably the most important prerequisite for your survival as an author. Or maybe wine or chocolate. For some authors, it's probably all three, but I digress. Why are reviews so important? It's because they are the number one factor that feeds into not only your book sales, but also your Amazon ads and helps make you eligible for new and exciting opportunities. If an event promoter or a producer you've pitched has never heard of you, they're going to go to your Amazon page and check you out. And if your book only has seven reviews, that might make them think twice about putting you on their stage or their podcast. How many reviews do you need? We found that for Amazon ad performance, 25 reviews are the first tipping point. The next big tipping point for conversions with ads and even media wins is is 50 reviews. Any number over 100 is excellent. Prepare yourself mentally for the journey that is review solicitation. Confident newbie authors often tell me that hundreds of people have promised to write reviews. Then one month post launch, these same authors are stunned to find their books have just 20 reviews and they don't know how to get more. This isn't to demoralize you, but I find a good dose of reality goes a long way towards setting expectations in terms of the effort you need to get results. The good news is there are platforms and services designed to help authors get book reviews, and I'll get to those later. First, let's get some clarity around the different kinds of reviews you need. After that, we will review the vetted services and tools to help you on this leg of your book adventure. To start, there are two primary types of book customer reviews and editorial reviews. For most books, both are needed. You're likely familiar with customer reviews, as they are highly visible for most products and services. Editorial reviews, on the other hand, may be something you don't know that much about, so let's cover Those first. The 411 on editorial reviews an editorial book review is different from a customer review, your average reader, in that it's usually from a recognized author, reviewer for a media outlet, or expert in the field. When you post an editorial review to your Amazon page, the heat map research from Kindlepreneur shows that it's more about who is writing the review than what they say. Of course, you don't want to have a popular reviewer post a scathing review of your book, and if they did, you certainly wouldn't repost it to your Amazon page. But it's important to keep in mind that your readers are really looking at the who of Your editorial reviews versus the what, of the content. Editorial reviews have the power to lend your book and you, the author, some of the reviewer's authority and credibility. An ideal reviewer is someone who has illustrious credentials and even better, is an expert in an area relevant to the book's subject matter. The latter is great, but it isn't always necessary. As an example, Shelley Buck, co author of Leave youe Light on, has some phenomenal editorial reviews, but the first ones you see on her online marketing pages aren't critics or authors. Instead, there's one from the CEO of Disney. Even Kristen Bell wrote a review for her. And just in case you're wondering if it was that Kristen Bell, the word actress was added. CEO, coo, nyt, Best Selling Author, celebrity. Those are all great qualifiers for ideal folks to write you an editorial review. I know you're asking Julie I'm not connected to anybody famous, so how do I get those kinds of reviews? You could do what a lot of people do, and that is reach out to some of the authors in your niche whom you respect. Hopefully you've already been networking with some of them. If you're looking for cover endorsements, then the ones you don't use for your cover could be used as editorial reviews. If they're an author in your niche or genre, they would qualify as an editorial reviewer. Keep in mind, authors get asked for blurbs and endorsements all the time. Here are tips for getting cool endorsements. 1. Think of companies that are well known and respected by your audience. You can even ask your favorite AI system like ChatGPT or Jasper for some ideas. 2. Make a list that makes sense for your book. 3. Hop on LinkedIn, Twitter or whatever platform makes sense for you and your book and see if you can connect with some of the company's top level executives or even its founders. 4. Look for common connections and ask for introductions if you have a friend who knows the right person. If not, reach out and ask for help. More on that in a minute. Think how great it would look if the president of Airstream endorsed your travel book. Or how cool it would be to have the founder of no Bull Apparel endorse your book on sport based leadership strategies for business. I randomly selected those examples, but my guess is that those folks are not asked nearly as often for book blurb endorsements as other authors or even major CEOs, and they may find it fun getting their name on the COVID of your book. Watch for media that feature your book. If they say anything cool about your book, then you can include an excerpt as part of your editorial reviews. The same thing goes for blogs and podcasts. We often land reviews for clients through services like NetGalley. We also submit authors to read reviews, Midwest book reviews, and other programs. There are other paid professional review services as well, some legit, some less so. I'll get into more detail about these kind of services soon. Paying for the opportunity for your book to be reviewed is playing by the rules with Amazon. Because these reviews are going to be in the editorial review section, not the customer review section. You can use the reviewer's words in your editorial review section. Whether you paid for the review or not, it's all in the presentation. Once you've got that editorial review, the steps are to post it on your Amazon book page and make it look impressive. My recommendation is to italicize the review text and then bold the reviewer's name and qualifier. Formatting that bit as bolded makes a potential buyer stop and read the name and qualifier first, as in CEO of Disney Use HTML for this formatting. If you have a favorite AI bot, it can format the HTML you need. ChatGPT is particularly good at this, but there are plenty of AI coding bots that can do basic HTML. Other tools like Publisher Rocket have a feature on their desktop site that will let you do that really easily. You can also ask Google how to create italics and bold HTML. It's not hard to do, and it's worth taking this extra step to make your editorial reviews look professional on your book page. You won't use your editorial reviews on only your Amazon page, although it's one of the primary placements. You'll also want them on your author media kit. Websites and Promotional Materials As a best practice for presenting editorial reviews, we recommend creating attractive social media imagery for them. We share some of the editorial wins on our social media, so you can always connect with book launchers on Instagram. At the end of the day, your number one priority as an author must marketing a book should still be to get as many consumer reviews as you can. But editorial reviews are an important piece of that book marketing puzzle too. Getting a dozen amazing editorial reviews to add to your Amazon book page and marketing materials can really boost your credibility and book sales. Let's turn to how you actually get those reviews. For starters, one of the most important tools is ARCs. What is an ARC? Have you ever heard someone say they got an ARC copy of a book? Or maybe you've been researching book promotion and heard that ARCs are an important part of getting book reviews. ARCs are advanced reader copies of a book. They're created for the purpose of getting advance, pre launch editorial reviews and media coverage and enticing booksellers to carry the book. They're not usually the final version of the book, but they are very close. There may still be typos or formatting errors. Sometimes they'll even include marketing plans on the COVID as background information for the media. The point of an ARC is to spread word about the upcoming release and build momentum for a solid book launch. Traditionally, they have been labeled as arcs on the manuscript. This labeling could appear on the COVID on every page at the top or bottom, or as a watermark lightly labeled behind the text. This kind of labeling was important in the days before self publishing because traditional publishers often sent ARCs out well before manuscripts were finalized. This is less common now as most publishing companies have shifted to ebooks for their arcs and will put a watermark or some other electronic control on the copy. Services like BookFunnel are great tools for sending protected electronic ARC copies. It's wise to plan on creating an ARC version of your book so you can use it to gain endorsements for your cover and other marketing materials, as well as to get review momentum going well before your launch. What's worked to get Reviews? My personal experience. You won't always know where reviews come from. A year after Self Publish and Succeed was out, I went through all of my Goodreads and Amazon reviews to determine what strategies worked to get reviews and what strategies didn't seem to have an impact. After I share my findings, I'll list a few ideas that other authors recommend for reviews. Here's what I found. My existing audience was the biggest source. My YouTube besties and book launchers clients were absolutely my number one source. Cultivating a community of people and adding value to their lives on a regular basis means that when you ask for support, you'll get it. NetGalley worked well. We went through IBPA to get a reduced rate on a NetGalley review and it resulted in at least a handful of reviews. More on NetGalley in a second. Booksprout was hit and miss. Booksprout is another paid service and I tracked four reviews back to them. I'll explain how they work shortly. That said, we use this service for our authors and get mixed results. It's worth trying, but it may or may not result in reviews for your book. Goodreads giveaways generated activity on the site While I can't be certain that this resulted in much in terms of Amazon reviews because this was before Amazon automatically posted Goodreads reviews, it did generate activity asking, begging and celebrating every review was fun. For months I posted thank yous on social media. We also held a reviewer party where we made sure everyone won something. If you submit a review of this book, shoot us an email@teamoklaunchers.com with a screenshot of the review and we'll be sure to thank you and invite you to our online or real life parties too. Our reviewer party was super fun and I was able to provide content, have fun, and reward attendees with swag. Every review was helpful, especially in the beginning. What didn't attract reviews for Self publish and succeed? The biggest strategy that didn't work was hoping reviews would appear for different formats. The audiobook has sold decently well and yet I didn't get very many audiobook specific reviews. I know a few YouTube besties tried to post audiobook reviews and had them removed, and I didn't take a proactive approach to get those kind of reviews. You can post a review of Self Publish and succeed on Audible now if you'd like. Audible doesn't include Amazon reviews, so when someone goes to their Audible app, it may look far less impressive than their reviews on Amazon. The other thing that didn't work was asking for reviews in my newsletter. It's impossible to tell, but the links where I ask for people to click here and post a review didn't see much action. They may have served as a reminder for some people, but they didn't move the needle anywhere near as much as places like Goodreads, Booksprout or NetGalley. Or as much as leveraging my wonderful community and just asking people one on one how to ask for a review because of the importance of reviews. This is a subject we continually discuss in our bi weekly launch letter and over at Booklaunchers tv, so I highly recommend you connect with us there for all the latest tips and ideas when the opportunity arises. Ask for a review, but how you do it is important. The last thing you want to do is annoy someone when you ask them for a favor. Opening to ask for a review may look like someone says they read your book and loved it. An interviewer asks how they can support you. You've received an email question from someone that your book can answer. You'll know the opportunity when it comes. Seize it. How you ask someone for a review depends on your personality. Of course, it also depends on the person and context. Here are some of the ways I can you help me by posting a review on Amazon so I can find other readers like you who will benefit from the book. The greatest gift you can give an author is a review of their book on your favorite book buying website. Please help me have more impact with my book by posting a review. Please, please, please post a review and you'll be my friend for life. If you post a review of the book, please email it to me and I'll get you on the list for our next reviewer party. If you're emailing people, do it one on one and keep track of who promised to post a review. Don't be a total pain, but be brave enough to follow up once or twice to get them to follow through on their promise. You need the reviews. Next up, let's talk about some of the best services and additional tools you can use to drum up those all important reviews. Review services and Tools Make It Easier Paying services to help you get reviews isn't the same as paying someone to review your book. You need book reviews as an author, and while you can't ethically pay someone to give you a positive review, there are some great legitimate review services out there that will help you find a reviewer. At Book Launchers, we use Goodreads, Netgalley, Book Sirens, and Booksprout for our authors. New services are always popping up too, so ask around your favorite forum or check out our latest videos on booklaunchers TV to find new ones. You can also pay services like Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Readsy, and booklife, among others. Some are expensive, but sites like Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly carry a lot of weight with libraries and bookstores. If getting wide distribution is part of your plan, it might be worth the investment. The best book review sites for you depend on your book category, your overall strategy, and your goals for your book, as well as whom you're targeting with your book. The ultimate goal is the same on every site, though, to increase your exposure, find new readers, and bump up that review count. Fiction authors have even more services to help them, as well as ebook and audiobook sales services too, but that's a different topic. Goodreads not all sites make sense for every author. At Book Launchers, while we submit some books for Kirkus or Publishers Weekly, we most often use Goodreads. This is the single most popular review site in the publishing industry and the top online community for both book lovers and authors alike. As of the writing of this book, they claim to have more than 140 million members worldwide. Yeah, that's a lot of readers. Even better is that Goodreads reviews now appear on Amazon. Amazon owns Goodreads, so integration makes sense. When someone posts a review on Goodreads, it does double duty. While every author and their books should be on Goodreads, you need to decide for yourself how much time and energy is worth investing in this platform. This is largely going to depend on the genre of your book and its desired audience. Memoirs do better on this platform than hardcore financial investment books. For instance, past reports have shown the audience is primarily females in the US under 35 with a graduate school education. If your reader is likely to be in that audience, this could be a great place for you to invest some time. One pro tip and a word of caution, when you create your Goodreads account and connect it to your Amazon account, do not connect via Facebook or Twitter. Also, if it's possible, and it might not be possible because you have to tie it back to your Amazon account to select the books that are yours, set it up with a different email address than you use for those social media accounts. Let's face it, Amazon already has way more information about us than most of our closest relatives have, maybe even our significant others. Even so, any little step you can take to keep things separate can help you retain as many reviews as possible. Amazon has been known to remove a lot of reviews in sweeps, and many authors believe that these kind of connections can make it easier for Amazon to remove reviews from people who have a connection to you, whether they are friends or family or not. The strategy here is to get people to add your book to their virtual bookshelves and write reviews. You also want other users to see your book in their friends feeds. Hopefully when they see it, they will they add your title to their reading list too. It's like a 90 million reader game of telephone. Bottom line, get in there, create your Goodreads account, claim your books, put up a nice 400 by 400 pixel headshot of yourself, and voila. Now you're ready to use your Goodreads account for the greater good of your book promotion. This is the absolute minimum any author should do. Here are three more ideas. Run a Goodreads Giveaway this is something we do on a regular basis for our clients. If you want to drive more attention to your book for a fee, this option can add value in getting you more reviews and a whole lot of potential readers to put you on their want to read list. All active giveaways are listed on the giveaway section of the website and your fans can link to it and encourage their friends to enter the giveaway too. Once upon a time, Goodreads giveaways were free, but you had to mail physical copies. These days it costs a fee of $119 to run a Goodreads giveaway or $599 for the premium giveaway option. But you can also run them using ebooks, so at least you don't have to handle addresses, shipping and printing costs for your winners. Instead, winners are emailed their copy from Amazon. That makes things easier Are Goodreads giveaways worth doing? If you have a limited budget and you're a nonfiction author, I'd probably spend my money on a netgalley promotion. Read more about them later to get high quality reviews from the right readers versus spending my marketing budget at Goodreads. But again, this varies. It's worth doing 20 minutes worth of research to click around the site and see what kind of books are being given away, especially books in your genre or similar topic to yours and the responses these offers usually get. Typically, memoirs are a great fit, as are self help, fitness, health and mindset books. Promote your book with paid ads the reality for many nonfiction authors, especially business and finance authors, is that your ideal reader probably isn't spending a ton of time on Goodreads. Do your research before you decide to invest in their pay per click ads. It's a simple ad platform and it could be a great way for you to boost your book sales, but check first to see if your ideal reader is on the platform. Engage with the platform. There's a spot on every author page for a Q and A just waiting to be filled. You can also create a list of books and share it on Listopia or add your books to other lists. Your book will get up and down votes on these lists, so it needs to be relevant to the topic. Bottom line. The tens of millions of readers who use good reads are always looking for their next read, so you belong there. Whether you spend a lot of time on Goodreads depends on whether your ideal reader is likely to be hanging out there or not. NetGalley NetGalley is an online service that connects book publishers with reviewers. As an author or publisher, you can pay to list your book with NetGalley and they release it to their database of professional readers. These are reviewers, members of the media, bloggers, librarians, booksellers, podcast hosts, and others who just really love books. These readers can then request a digital arc of your book for review. This can be an effective marketing tool for your entire author brand, not just your book because your book is made available to people who want to read it for their professional capacity. A NetGalley promotion offers your arc for six months or you can do a shorter three month promotion if you purchase through a service like IBPA or Expresso Book Tours. It also highlights your book in the recently added and Read now sections of their database as well as in the sections specific to your title's categories. That way all users see it on the website. The best time to start using NetGalley to get reviews for your book is six to eight weeks before it launches. Reviewers are most interested in reading and reviewing a book before it's launched. That said, if your book is already out in the wild, NetGalley will still accept your title. It's a fee based service, so it's really up to you to decide whether it makes sense for you post launch or not. What does netgalley cost and what do I actually get? The cool part about how NetGalley works is that a reviewer typically posts reviews to their NetGalley profile and also to Amazon, Goodreads and sometimes blogs or other media. Each review from NetGalley gives you more exposure than a typical Amazon review. The reviewer is doing this for free and they're getting your book for free, but they are motivated book reviewers in most situations, reviewing books is related to their occupation. We see a lot of librarians, bookstore employees and journalists who write about books posting reviews. However, they are specially vetted to post reviews on NetGalley. NetGalley also gives you a certain amount of control over who is going to review your work through their database. When someone requests your ARC directly through NetGalley, you get access to the book reviewer's profile and can approve their access to your book or not. You can see reviews they've written and reject the request if you think they are unfair or not a good fit for your book. If you go through another service like IBPA or Expresso to get the discounted listing, you will not have the ability to reject the request. It's a trade off for lower cost access. A word on Netgalley reviewers brace yourself for a 4 out of 5 review or worse. Even if the reviewer shares a glowing review, they often tag it with a four star rating. What we found is that these are reviewers who aren't your average readers. Because they are often people from the book world. They are saving their five stars for what they consider the absolute best books. If you've invested in creating a top quality book, this should not deter you. We still like the service because it's trusted in the industry, you are likely to get a handful of reviews and sometimes these reviewers are in a position of power and influence where they can get your book into other places. For example, one of our clients got a netgalley 5 star review hooray. From a librarian who said that she was going to recommend the book be listed in all of the libraries in her library's system. That's the power of NetGalley reviews. If you get a great review, don't forget to actually use it to promote your book. Post it on your author page, website and social media how to get the Most out of netgalley netgalley has a widget and some other share links. Use these to get the word out so people in the database find out about your book's availability. You can't automatically assume that people will see your listing if you're not promoting it. You should encourage people to give your cover a thumbs up on NetGalley because that helps it get featured. Book Sirens and Booksprout Booksirens and Booksprout are like NetGalley in that they are review sites set up to deliver your ARC copy to readers and reviewers, but these two sites are more for the average reader versus the person in the book industry. Just like NetGalley, though, they focus on getting your ARC securely to book reviewers and bloggers and and your Book Army. Book Sirens boasts more than 30,000 readers across a variety of genres, with an average review rate of 75%. You first send your books to the Book Sirens team for evaluation so they can confirm that it is a quality book they want to offer to their users. Once it's approved, your book will be added to its category where users can discover it, download the arc, and start reading. Book Sirens also supplies you with a direct link to send to your Book army. That means those folks can hop on over and securely download their ARC for free. You also have the option of choosing whether your reviews are posted on Goodreads, Amazon, or both. Booksprout is another option to consider if your main priority is a pre launch review push. Similar to Book Sirens, booksprout is a review site that automates the delivery of your ARC to more than 40,000 users, and even your own BookArmy can't beat their average review rate, which exceeds 79%. We've been testing this service at Book Launchers with really mixed results. My book, well after launch, got four reviews from a single booksprout listing, but the other books we tested didn't see any results. It's worth noting that we've experienced the same thing with Book Sirens. Some of our clients, however, have had good results getting reviews. In other words, be ready to test different services because some things will work and others won't. Whether you go with Book Sirens, booksprout, or both, they're easy to use. Effective sites if you need a little help getting reviews for your book. If this is your first book or your book army looks a little sparse on the pre launch battlefield, one or both of these review sites could be your answer. Change your mind, Change your results. Are there other ways to get reviews? Well, sure, you just have to ask for them. As we discussed, you can do that in person, via email, on your social media, at the back of your book, and on your knees, or from a seated or standing position. I know it feels needy or demanding. Plus, you're too busy. But after all your hard work, you've earned the right to go to people and ask will you help me by writing an Amazon review? If you follow the book launcher's NoBoringBooks process and you've invested in creating a great book, you should be proud of your book. Plus, here's the thing. You wrote your book to have an impact, didn't you? That's not going to happen if nobody buys your book, and they are unlikely to buy a book that doesn't have reviews. Writing a book to help others walking along a similar path is generous and noble, and you can look at reviews as something you need to do to help your reader, not just you. In turn, grateful readers will thank you by writing more reviews and growing your relationship and fan base. Everyone has to get started somewhere. Stick with it. You've got this to view and download a chapter summary, which is a table of where to find your reviewers, go to self promoteandsucceed.com Chapter 10 in the books Chapter 11 coming up below, down on libraries.