Here is the big lie they told you about book reviews.
“You need sales to get reviews”
You most certainly need reviews to get sales, but the reverse is not true. In fact, book sales is the slowest process when it comes to reviews.
To get reviews you must put your book in the hands of Book Reviewers. That simple.
The three kinds of book reviewers.
Professional reviewers, book bloggers and casual reviewers.
Book bloggers and casual reviewers are almost always interested in the content of a book. They don’t care much about the publication year or publisher’s name.
The good news is that, although professional reviews can be a lot harder to get, casual and blogger reviews can be just as valuable.
The bad news is that finding casual reviewers to review your book on Amazon is still not easy.
That is perhaps because, you are not supposed to find them.
They need to find you.
Sure, you can give a book to somebody and ask them to review it, but if they were not already looking for that kind of book (and the chances of that are slim), getting them to read it and review it (for free as per Amazon’s terms) is not going to happen.
Note that I did not say that it’s hard to give away free books to people and ask them for reviews. People will happily accept freebies, but you will need to push several thousands of copies to get a handful of reviews. And to do that, you need marketing dollars and marketing knowledge.
Don’t get me wrong, there is no way to avoid marketing. The idea is to make is cost effective and worth the effort.
So, how do you get reviewers to find your book?
Think of the perfect reviewer. No, that’s not the one who would leave you a five-star review although I see where you are coming from. The ideal reviewer is the person who would have bought your book even if it was not a free review copy. Therefore, the ideal reviewer is nothing more than your target reader.
Once your target readers finds your book, you can offer them a free copy and ask for a review. You cannot offer a free copy “in exchange” as per Amazon, so be careful of the language you use here.
By free copy, I mean one of three things. You can either send them the ebook file or you can send them a Prepaid Amazon link, or a Gift Amazon link. The first one is self-explanatory. Amazon pre-paid and gift links are basically secret Amazon links where somebody can claim a free Kindle version of your book.
Prepaid and Gift links are not the same although they appear to be. One important difference is that prepaid links cannot be exchanged for credit whereas gift links can. Therefore, with prepaid links you can be 100% sure that the recipient will get the book (and you will also get the royalty payment back). However, prepaid links result to Unverified reviews whereas Gift links result to Verified reviews.
Getting your review copy to the hands of your target reader will also require a marketing budget and marketing knowledge. However, you will end up spending way less per review.
So, what’s your next step?
Unfortunately, you cannot use Amazon ads to offer free review copies in exchange for reviews. BookPub does not allow links to lead funnels so that can be restrictive. That leaves you with Google and Facebook ads, but you have to know what you are doing.
If you use Google, you will have to host a page where you kindly ask for a review and offer a free review copy.
If you use Facebook, you could ask for people to get in touch with you through your page. A better strategy is to ask readers to simply comment on a post and have a bot reply back to them with the review copy. This process, and even the follow up, can be automated entirely.
Finally, you might just want to try
Fiveabook, a website that I started to help authors and publishers get reviews for their books.
MORE ABOUT TODAY’S GUEST BLOGGER
Ioannis Tsiokos is a programmer, author, book publisher and entrepreneur. He has published over 100 non-fiction titles. He owns and is managing director of Fiveabook.com, a website that connects authors who want reviews for their books with readers that enjoy free books. Find him on Twitter @fiveabook.
