In today’s post I want to talk about reviews and how to get more reviews for your book. Reviews, both positive and negative ones, are great to have as they help potential customers decide whether to buy your book and make your book look legitimate. They can also give a boost on launch day. In this post I want to discuss some methods for getting more reviews for your book.
How to get more reviews for your book
- Ask for reviews in your backmatter. One easy set it and forget type of method to get more reviews for your book is to ask for reviews in the backmatter of your book. Ideally put this as soon after the end of the actual story as possible. If you have another call for action already in your backmatter you can place the ask for review after that. You can go with a sentence that simply asks them to review where they can or include the links to the vendor sites if you like to make it easier for the reviewers to go directly to those sites.
- Sell more copies of your book. This one works especially well if you already have an ask for reviews in your backmatter. The more books you sell the more reviews you usually get. This is a more slower method as it can take time to accumulate reviews if you only rely in this.
- Run a sale for your book. This one ties in with the previous point. As more sales means more reviews, running a sale or free days for your book can help in the long run with reviews. This does usually take a while as not everyone who buys or grabs your book might read it anytime soon.
- Ask for reviews in your newsletter. Another way to get more reviews is to ask for reviews in your newsletter. When you have a new book releasing or even when running a sale add a note about how much you appreciate reviews and would love a few more. This can give you some more reviews for the book in question. It can help to include links to the various sites you would like to receive reviews.
- Ask for reviews on social media. Similar to the previous point you can also ask for reviews on your social media sites. To make it easier for reviewers you can include links to the various vendor sites or use a Books2Read link for sites like twitter where you might not have enough space to include all the different links.
- Set up an ARC team. Having an ARC team can help give you an influx of reviews around release day and often some later than that as well. You can also send your ARC team copies of your backlist books if there are any you want more reviews for. Want to know more about how to set up an ARC team? I did a post about how to set up an arc team, that you can read here.
- Contact bookbloggers and bookreviewers directly. You can contact bookbloggers, bookstagrammers and bookreviewers directly with a review request and ask whether they would like to read and review your book. This is pretty time intensive, but it can be effective. Count on having to contact about 100 reviewers to have around 10 reviewers to accept a copy and then usually even less that will actually review your book. Nevertheless it can be a solid way to reach more reviewers or find people add to your ARC team. For best results, try and focus on bookbloggers, bookstagrammers and bookreviewers that read and review books in your genre and that are currently active and accepting review requests.
- Book a blog tour/ review tour or review opportunity for your book. This option is less time intensive, but often costs money. You can book a blog tour, review tour or review opportunity for your book with a tour company. It depends on the company what these entail, so make sure the tour you book includes review stops if more reviews is your goal. Some companies also have tours that focus solely on reviews like review tours or review opportunities. The benefit of blog tours is that these companies have lists of reviewers and bookbloggers who want to hear about new books. This saves you the time and effort of having to find and contact them yourself. You can read more about what a blog tour is here or what to expect from a blog tour here.
- Put your book on review sites. There are sites where you can upload your book that will help more reviewers hear about it and give them the chance to request your book for review. Some examples of these are Netgalley, Booksprout and Book Sirens. These sites usually already have an audience and you can reach their audience by adding your book to their site. This is low on the time investment and higher on the money cost.
- Join group promotions. Another way to get reviews for your book is to upload your book on a site that distributes copies and then join a group promotion. These are sites like Prolific Works, Story Origin and Bookfunnel. These mainly serve as a way to distribute your review copies, but won’t actively lead new reviewers to your book unless you contact them directly yourself or join group promotions. Group promotions with other authors in your genre can be a great way to get your book in the hands of more people and get more reviews for your book.
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