How to Get Book Reviews in 2018 (Without Going Crazy)

So you want to know the best ways of getting book reviews for your book now it is finally written? Here are some ideas for those glowing reviews to come flooding in, updated for what works in 2018.

What Works in 2018

Use a Reader eMailing Service – Success Rate – 100% + 1- 5% quota met as advertised + high ranking and exposure on Amazon

It’s getting harder to get Verified Customer Reviews, which are the reviews that have most weight for ranking high on Amazon. The only true way to do this is to have access to lists of many, many reader-reviewers. In my five years of experience using lists every day, the average rate of return on a qualified list (people who joined the list when invited or signed up and meet all your criteria, such as genre fans and reviewers) is around 500 reviews per million requests. These sorts of lists need maintenance every week, and sometimes every hour. They are hugely difficult to maintain alone, and require constant adjustments. Getting a professional company that deals with reader lists is your only option to get Verified Reviews, as their emails are expected and wanted, and they are recommending vast arrays of books at discounted prices to the specific genre reader.

BookBub is the most famous and trusted services for e-mailers for trad or small press books, but for indie books, we offer one of the most reliable services for Amazon Reviews here.

Goodreads Giveaways – Success Rate – average 2 or 3 reviews per giveaway on Amazon, 4 or 5 average on Goodreads + exposure for your book

If you get reviews on Goodreads, sometimes the reader will put their review on Amazon too. However, as they never bought the book, it will only show up as a Customer Review, not a Verified Review. Since November 2017, Giveaways now cost from $59. To set up a Goodreads Giveaway, check out the latest information here.

Readings – Success Rate – 3 or 4 sales/reviews per reading + exposure to a new crowd

A really nice way to get new readers is to find open mic nights where you can read an excerpt to a friendly crowd who like books – a humorous portion of your work usually goes down best. Having some cards or flyers with your author website on it for afterwards is not a bad plan either. Face to face promotion is great for new authors to get into a clique locally. Check Craigslist, local press, and Facebook for open mic nights near you, or use Open Mic Finder.

Virtual Book Tours – Success Rate – 90 -100%  – Unverified reviews only (Goodreads and Amazon mix) + exposure for your book

Virtual book tours get you reviews on websites, Goodreads, and Amazon (but usually only unverified reviews).  Simply sign up for one and send a copy of your book plus requested info to the tour manager and they will send your book info out to a selection of blogs to publicize your work. Sometimes you will be asked to do interviews during your tour. The blogger who showcases your book will often then leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon after they read the book. Book tours are inexpensive, and we use Promotional Book Tours, who deliver what they promise for a very reasonable fee.

Editorial Reviews – Success Rate – Approx. 50 – 140 clicks/reviews/reviews per post – helps with Amazon Ranking

Editorial Reviews are a great way to gain exposure and professional copy to use in your book promotion cycle. As for gaining reviews on Amazon? They still work, three ways. We track clicks after a book is reviewed on Self-Publishing Review, and our tracking shows three- and four-figure direct clicks to book links. This means by buying yourself a professional editorial piece about your book, you will get potential buyers clicking right through to your book sales pages. Ours start at a reasonable $139 for a 200-word review with a 2-week turnaround written by a professional reviewer. Other review services such as Blue Ink and Kirkus Indie are pricier, but offer different sorts of exposure, so it’s worth checking them out.

Amazon now puts Editorial Reviews before Customer Reviews on a book page, so you should quote your review copy in the section provided on Author Central, such as on this page for The Fault in our Stars by John Green:

Amazon gives more weight to the most complete book pages, so having an Author Central page correctly filled out with these sorts of reviews is something that can help you get exposure for Customer Reviews.

Free Book Sites – Success Rate – Approx. 1 review in 300 books downloaded, possible 1000 books downloaded

If you don’t care about giving away loads of  copies, then using free book giveaways might get you a couple of unverified reviews. There’s not much evidence to suggest you will get more than a handful.

What Doesn’t Work Anymore

Manually emailing Amazon Reviewers – Success Rate – Less than 1 in 100, finite list

There was a time when Amazon Reviewers didn’t mind being constantly asked for reviews for indie ebooks so much. Now, they do. When this method came to light in 2016, it was a new and untried thing. Bloggers jumped on it, wrote about how to politely ask for a review, tech startups designed apps to scrape email addresses from Amazon (see below), and showed you how to write the politest letter possible. However, most authors have found they get only one or two replies, and usually, just to tell them to ‘do one.’ This method has saturated the patience of Amazon Reviewers, and many have taken their email off Amazon now to stop getting all the spam. The only way now is to scan many, many profiles taking hours to see if any of the Amazon Reviewers say they are happy to take ebooks on.

HOWEVER: You will probably be able to still use this method to some degree with YA Romance/Paranormal books and Christian books, because those fans have more camaraderie with indie authors, but not many other genres these days.

Setting expectations: Amazon rules state that you must not demand a review in exchange for a book. This means it is not permitted to ask anyone, especially not known Amazon reviewers, to review ‘in exchange’ for a free book. You can offer the book in the hope they will review it, but not with a fixed expectation. Also, worth noting that any review written where the book was not bought with real money on a real account, will not count as a Verified Review, so this is really a lot of work for maybe one or two unverified reviews. You can read here how author Rachel Straub spent literally hours and hours gaining twenty or so unverified reviews out of 3000 reviewers she had to scan, one by one…for hours…less than a 1% hit rate! (Note her book is non-fiction sports – much easier all round to get non-fiction reviews too.) She is still waiting for the majority of reviews to appear after eight months…

Email Scraping Apps – Success Rate – Less than 1 in 15000 (and illegal)

As for email scraping from the Amazon Reviewers list – Email scraping to use the email addresses for unqualified leads is illegal. The CAN-SPAM Act 2003 is a direct response to spamming by the US government . And yes, it is enforced. Wikipedia lists several prosecuted cases, including this one, that should scare you off using scraping tools forever: “On April 29, 2004, the United States government brought the first criminal and civil charges under the Act. Criminal charges were filed by the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, and the FTC filed a civil enforcement action in the Northern District of Illinois. The defendants were a company, Phoenix Avatar, and four associated individuals: Daniel J. Lin, James J. Lin, Mark M. Sadek, and Christopher Chung of West Bloomfield, Michigan. Defendants were charged with sending hundreds of thousands of spam emails advertising a “diet patch” and “hormone products.” The FTC stated that these products were effectively worthless. Authorities said they face up to five years in prison under the anti-spam law and up to 20 years in prison under U.S. mail fraud statutes.”

While it might not be illegal to sell an app that will “harvest” those emails for you, it’s certainly illegal to then go ahead and spam the bejesus out of that list.

As for the criminal record you would hold? I don’t like the full name of that law much for a job application: “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited P*rnography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003”. Not exactly a parking ticket. Read more about these issues here in an article by email experts Send Blaster.

The kicker is that these apps don’t even get you reviews. One author said of one such tool, “In three weeks I got to search 30,000 worth of reviews and this got me just over 50 emails. Out of that 8 bounced, I got two very abusive replies and only two replied offering to read my book. Every week I search 10,000 reviews using the targeter, that’s around 60,000 in the last two months. I have had 18 replies from potential reviewers and I have received 4, yes 4, reviews.”

In tests, this has been our experience also. The tools might work in that they get you the emails, but what you can do with them once you have them is both illegal and questionable.

Building Mailing Lists – Success Rate – Miserable

Blogs that recommend this method are not just authors, but also sell ongoing services, and have a signup page where readers can get information on their services and products. Therefore they find they have a built-in list if they do write a book. That’s not the case with most pure authors. Most authors have around 100 people on their list if they work really, really hard at it. The trouble is, your books are a one-time purchase. How many times can you bother the same 100 people about your book? Once they buy it, that’s that. Even if you wrote five books, that’s not many sales. Surprising but true, many people you thought would buy your book to support you probably won’t. This method has little longevity, and people will unsubscribe if you keep emailing without offering any new incentives to stay subscribed. Problem is…

Offering incentives – Success Rate – Fatal

While this might seem like a great way of getting people to buy your book, offering them an emailed next chapter or a free something, think back to the last time that worked on you… Yeah, didn’t think so. Plus offering incentives in any way in exchange for an Amazon Review is against Amazon Guidelines, and you could risk having your entire book page removed, or worse, your entire account.

Writing guest posts – Success Rate – Blue Moon

It didn’t take long for the few to spoil this one for the many either. Back in 2015, it was easy to get guest posts on blogs, and content was crafted and considered. Now, too many spammy marketing companies request a guest spot so they can talk about their lame products, and it’s put off many blogs from even considering having guest bloggers. There are a few sites that still let you do it for free (us included) but there is so much noise out there now it’s hard to get heard on social media at all. With content getting more competitive, you have to come up with something better than a quick point to point article if you want to get shared.  A good blog post will be shared at SPR and on our social media.