2021 – How To Get Amazon Reviews Without Breaking The Rules

There are various discussions about getting Verified Amazon reviews for your book, but there’s only one sure way that works.

While the humble mailing list has been touted in many corners of the publishing world, it still rules as the only definite way of selling your book and getting Verified reviews.

But not all mailing lists are equal.

Amazon Rules

While it seems easy enough to add friends and family to your mailing list, here’s what to bear in mind: Once they bought your book, you can’t keep touting them for business.

The second issue is that Amazon does not allow friends and family of an author to review the book on Amazon, and if you are a new author, maybe this is the only way you were counting on getting those reviews.

You also can’t swap reviews with other authors, or pay, exchange tokens, or any other incentive to get reviews. While some services offer this, it’s actually against Amazon’s Terms. You cannot post “a review by someone perceived to have a close personal relationship with the product’s owner, author, or artist.”

So how do you find readers that like reviewing books?

Author Site Sign-Ups Don’t Cut It

Many so-called advice sites tell you to collect emails from your website.

The hard truth is that mailing lists rule if they are huge and filled with active readers, that is, members of the public you don’t know. If you think adding a box to your website for people to sign up will do it, it won’t.

You need literally thousands of people to sign up for it, and that’s just too difficult to imagine for one author trying to compete with all the other authors online. You’re not going to get there.

Using Mailer Promotion Services

So what can you do? Your only safe option in 2021 is to use a mailing promotion service, where you don’t know anyone who might review your book, and you’re not asking for a biased (i.e. positive) review.

While there are plenty of services on the market for unverified reviews, that is, where the reader has not bought your book but is reviewing from a free copy, these don’t do enough in Amazon’s algorithm to help your exposure, and none of them guarantee you’ll get any reviews at all.

You’re looking at getting over 30 Verified reviews before you will see any benefit to promotions you do on Amazon (such as price countdowns).

Verified Amazon Reviews gained by emailer to thousands of readers are only available at a few companies in the world, because this sort of mailing list is a wondrous but very painstaking tool to keep current. We have to maintain our lists very meticulously, as they are a living, flowing beast of email subscribers who leave and join on a regular basis.

Even the best-known list service, BookBub, has changed its approach several times over the years to accommodate this flow, and nowadays, indie authors are lucky to get any reviews from their list as they have moved into trad publishing and more popular books soak up reviewers’ time.

That’s why we offer our Amazon Book Promotion service for indie authors, concentrating on finding readers who like indie books and understand how much your writing means to you.

We keep promoting until you get a minimum number of reviews, and can combine this with sales and ranking.

Take a look at our Mailing List Promotions for Amazon eBooks here.