Here are four simple methods to get honest book reviews in 2020. Authors are always looking for new ways to get reviews for their book, but most want an honest opinion. Attracting readers to buy your book is difficult enough, but getting them to leave a review is even harder.
Use a reader mailing list service. There are only two main services you can rely upon that result in Amazon Verified Customer Reviews (proof the reader actually bought the book) and sales within Amazon’s Review Guidelines. Both services have huge mailing lists of readers who buy, read, and review books. This leads to a percentage of those readers buying and reading your book, then leaving a review on Amazon.
- BookBub offers to promote your book to a vast list of readers who have signed up to receive emails about eBooks. However, BookBub requires a strict set of guidelines to accept your book into the program. They do not guarantee results but do provide promotion goals.
- SPR’s Amazon Promotion also promotes to a huge list of readers who review on Amazon. This service accepts all books of any genre as long as they are priced between 99 cents and $2.99 for the promotion period, and provides you with evidence of your best category rank for your promotion. SPR keeps going with the promotion until you reach your promotion goal.
There are many others promising to get you Amazon reviews, but most do not promise honest reviews, nor do they buy the book, and you may end up with a lot of badly-written unverified reviews. These companies may not be acting within Amazon Terms, which states you cannot pay a reviewer to leave a review. These unverified Amazon reviews services could lead to your account being removed from Amazon. Read about the difference between Verified and Unverified reviews at AMZ Advisers.
Verified Reviews on Amazon have much more weight for ranking and exposure
Goodreads Giveaways. Joining Goodreads and offering copies of your book for free may result in reviews on Goodreads. These will not be Verified Reviews as on Amazon, but will fill up your Goodreads profile nicely. Be aware you may have to give away several books repeatedly in order to get a decent amount of reviews, and this still works best with paperbacks.
Buy Editorial Reviews. Submit your book to websites that provide honest, reliable reviews written by professional reviewers and widely circulated online. Add them to your Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Goodreads book page to help promote your book. There are many companies offering this but few are of good quality.
The best services are SPR, Independent Review of Books, Kirkus, Foreword, and Blue Ink Review. While they cost more than you can get at other sites, their readership is much bigger and they have solid visibility such as social media and Google search results that other companies don’t have.
Book pages reserve a special place for you to place Editorial Reviews, such as Amazon’s Editorial Reviews section, which holds more weight than Customer Reviews and shows up higher on your book page.
Maintain your Amazon presence. By ensuring your book stays in the best category with the best keywords, you will show in results to the right readers. Amazon’s algorithm changes constantly, so the categories you had last week may not work for you this week. This is because new books and titans such as Stephen King and Margaret Atwood can easily rule over many categories very suddenly. Use our customized category and keyword service to ensure you are in the right place.
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