#025 - How to Get More Reviews for Your Book

Hey, hit splits. Family, this is Shelly Hitz, and I hope you enjoyed that miniseries on Kingdom marketing mindset for authors. And when we were putting this together, we decided to also make it available as a short Kindle ebook. And it's short sweet to the point where we're not ever going to make this huge book launch about it. But it's out there. If somebody wants the information in that format, it's available. It's only 99 cents. If somebody's searching on Amazon or Google, maybe it will come up and they'll find the other resources we have. Maybe they'll find our membership or our bookmarking shop. Who knows? But we put it out there and yeah, I didn't want it to be there without any reviews. And so how do you get more reviews for your book? Well, the biggest basic answer, and I know that most of you will not like this, we've been working with writers for over 12 years, is that you need to ask. You know, most writers just want to write and get their books out there and then everything else to magically happen. But it's like parenting a child when once you give birth to that child, there is still a lot of parenting that needs to be done right. Your work has just started. And so the same thing with giving birth to a book, you know, marketing is similar to parenting. And the marketing has just begun. And I really believe that part of the marketing is putting some effort into getting the initial reviews. So I say at least try to get at least 10 reviews and then let them come in organically from there. I did that for most of my books. Some books have a lot more reviews because it sold a lot more copies. Like my book Broken Crayons Still Color. It has a lot of reviews right now that some of my other books don't. But I always try to get at least a few reviews going, get, you know, get the momentum going and then see what happens next. So for this book, we just simply posted something in our group for Christian Book Academy and said, hey, we have a new book. Is anyone interested in reviewing it? And, you know, we would give you a free copy in exchange for a review or. But it was interesting because it's 99 cents. And this is, you know, some of you listening are part of our family in Christian Book Academy, and you love what we do. And so several people said, oh, it's 99 cents. I'll just buy it. So that way it's a. It's showing as a.

As a verified review. I couldn't think of the word at first, a verified review, and already two of them have posted the reviews. And I just asked a few days ago. And so, you know, sometimes we just need to ask. Now, you may not already have an audience, and so, you know, you may not have a place just to ask for reviews. We also sent an email to our list of reviewers, you know, just for our books for authors. And I think CJ got a few replies from that as well. So we may get some more reviews in the future. And then I asked here on the podcast, you know, when I shared that miniseries and I mentioned the book, you know, I asked if you, if you do, you know, read the book or get it on Amazon, leave a review or leave a review if you read it on YouVersion as the devotional plan. So I asked. And it, you know, it just, it's so interesting because I find that most of you in my audience have trouble asking others to do things for you, but you're more than happy to help other people do things. And so this is something that, you know, you can also be willing to do things for others that you would want them to do for you. Right? That's the golden rule in the Bible. Do unto others as you want them to do unto you. So there might be a case like, and I did this early on in my career as career as a writer. That still sounds funny, my career as a writer. Like, I have no idea how I ended up being a writer, except it was God. But anyways, early on in my career as a writer, I would read and review books for other writers because I was really at the very beginning stages and needed other people to read and review my books. Now it is against Amazon's terms of service just to say, hey, I'll review your book, you review mine to do a review swap. But it's not against their terms of service to say, hey, I'll review your book. And if that other person wants to review your book, you know, it's not, you're not saying, I'm reviewing your book because you're reviewing mine. But, you know, it's actually like planting seeds, sowing seeds into what you would love for other people to do for you. But I've also seen authors then get disappointed. And I've had people specifically typically say this to me even after they've joined our academy, saying, oh, I've reviewed other people's books and I've done things for other people, and no one's done it for me. And so, you know, there's also this, you know, Expectation that can come up of, oh, you know, nobody's doing it for me. And so I think we have to do it in a heart of generosity of like, I'm going to do this for others and I'm just going to pray and ask God to bring the right people for me to review my book. But you know what, we also need to ask if we're not asking people, if we're not reaching out, if we're not saying that hey, we need reviews. And so in Christian Book Academy, you know, that's something that you can ask in our group and some people might be interested in your book. Some people may not be, but recently one of our members posted and he was asking for reviews and he's already gotten several other members saying, I'm interested, I would love to read it. And so that's my thought for you today. Now if you want very specific information on how to get reviews, we have that training. We have a book called how to get Honest Reviews and I wrote that with Heather Hart. So that's available on Amazon. Other places where you get books. And if you're a Christian Book Academy member, you have access to that book for free. It's at the, it's at the end of the self published module because that's really when you're going to start requesting reviews is after you've published your book. We also have the how to get more reviews or, or get more get more reviews toolkit and that is also in the self published module in Christian Book Academy. And if you want to buy it on its own, it's in the book marketing shop. That is an incredible resource. I literally put hours and hours of time into it. I took all of the, the content that we had put together before, you know, regarding even that book and some of the templates and you're going to literally get a step by step plan of how to get, of how to ask for reviews. You're going to get all the templates that you can edit to make it sound like you. But you don't have to start from scratch like, because some people are like, well okay, that's great of how to, you know, you're telling me to ask, but what do I say? That's what the toolkit helps you do. Like every step of the process we give you templates of what to say when you first ask what to say when they say they'll, they'll review it. What, what to say when you're following up, you know, all of those things and that's the thing like when, when you're asking for reviews, following up is where you're going to get the most success in actually getting people to post. But anyways, I digress. Plus in the toolkit you're, you'll, you'll not only get the step by step plan the templates, but you'll get a Google Sheets spreadsheet to keep track of your reviewers. And people have loved this toolkit. It's just been a really great resource. So anyways, those resources are out there for you. But today my simple encouragement is have you asked, you know, when people tell you oh I got out your book for Christmas or I you know, read your book or this or that, ask them say hey, thank you so much. I am just thrilled that you got a copy of my book. You know, when you have a minute, would you mind just posting a short review on Amazon? That really helps me to get the message out and reach more people. I appreciate you so much. So that's not verbatim from the templates in our kit, but that's just an example of something you could could say. All we need to do is sometimes ask. So after we asked, you know, two people have already posted their reviews on, on Amazon and for our new book Kingdom Marketing Mindset for Authors. And we're hoping that more people will post those reviews in the coming weeks. We usually ask people within two to four weeks because we don't want to rush them, but this was a really short book. So you know, a couple people posted right away. But if you have gotten the book, like I said, It's 99 cents on Amazon. I'll put the link in the show notes, post a review, let us know. We would love to to hear from you and we appreciate you. So anyways, I hope that this encouraged you today and I will talk to you in the next episode.