FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Jump to: Book Review FAQs | Editing/Conversion FAQs | SPR Amazon Book Promotion FAQs | SPR Keyword/Category/Blurbs FAQs

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Book Review FAQs

We keep our overheads low and rely on word of mouth in the self-publishing community for our review clientele. We don’t diversify, we specialize. Many authors are repeat customers because we offer the best price, fastest turnaround, and longest word count for a review available on the market. A large portion our fee goes to the reviewer direct, unlike many other review services on the market – because we believe this is fair. So you can be assured of a well-authored review.

First off, SPR does not offer ‘paid reviews.’ We offer editorial reviews, which are professionally written for book marketing purposes. Amazon provides a section for these on each book page via Author Central.

All SPR products are within Amazon Guidelines. Our editor Cate Baum has written a handy guide here explaining our review products and the different types of book reviews available for authors in general.

We recommend you order your review in advance of marketing concerns so that you can get the most out of the review copy, such as using it on your book page etc. Always plan the date after you have secured your promotions. We suggest you try a soft launch (getting your book on Amazon and Goodreads first without publicizing it) so that Amazon and other outlets can fully scan your page and so that it shows in Google results before you promote it. We can always provide your review to use on your book and websites first, and hold off publishing it on our site until your full launch week.

We promise a thorough, honest, and professional review of at least 500 words. We post reviews on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, our newsletter, and B&N on request. All reviews will be featured on our front page and will be permanently linked on a page in our Book Reviews section. You may also post our review as an Editorial Review on Amazon. We provide the Amazon-length edit free with every review.

  • The value of  a review from SPR is in the opportunity it can provide for sales when used correctly in marketing campaigns.
  • A professional book review promotes your book to readers at points of sale where customer reviews are not available. These include the back of your book, the Editorial Reviews section on Amazon, which shows up first on your Amazon Book Page; your author website, your social media, and in press features about your book.
  • Seeing a starred review written by a professional inspires potential buyers to try the book for themselves as it holds more kudos than a customer review.
  • Some promotion services, including BookBub, expect a minimum amount of professional book reviews on your book page before accepting your book for promotion.
  • The value of an SPR Book Review is therefore worth multiple sales of your book.

Lead Story and Classic Reviews are finished within 30 working days of receiving your book. Jump Starts take 14 working days. Editorial Reviews take 7 working days. Working days are not calendar days, only Monday to Friday, plus holidays.

You can also expedite your review at checkout to have your review delivered in half the time, except for Editorial Reviews.

To see when your review is due, use this working day calculator. Select “Weekends and Public Holidays” for the United States from the date of your submission.

We will contact you with your review copy to ask for permission to publish. Once published, we send you all the links and add-ons you purchased.

Jump Starts and Micros (special offer only) are published without further consultation.

We send you an email with all your live links, badges, etc. when we publish the review online, and the link is shared on social media.

Yes, sure. We will hold the publication of the review until you go live so that we help promote sales, but many authors get reviewed before publication so they can use the review for their book cover or publicity.

When you have paid you can upload your ebook or manuscript via the link we send you automatically. We accept all e-book formats: .mobi, ePub, PDFs, Pages, and Word documents.

You can pay by credit/debit card on PayPal without a PayPal account. Just click the button on PayPal that says, Pay with Debit/Credit Card, demonstrated in this screenshot (image):

We process and queue orders automatically and you will receive an email receipt containing your purchase information, as well as a separate PayPal receipt. It takes between 1-8 days to publish Lead Story Reviews once we hear back from you due to waiting times for the leader board.

We do not get updates on the reviewer’s reading process – when it is finished we will write to you.

It depends what review you buy. With Classic and Lead Story Reviews you will get a chance to read your review and approve or deny publication. With a Jump Start, we publish the review automatically without asking for your approval. We will send you the review plus your Amazon Editorial Edit when it is ready, for all review packages.

Please credit the review as:

“Self-Publishing Review, {insert star rating here} stars” for Micro, Classic and Lead Story Reviews

“Self-Publishing Review” for Jump Start Reviews

or:

“SPR, {insert star rating here} stars” for Micro, Classic and Lead Story Reviews

“SPR” for Jump Start Reviews

For privacy reasons, our staff reviewers do not engage in debates over their finished work. If you would like a more private consult, you can request the same reviewer for a Beta Reader report.

Please note we will never use AI to create an editorial book review. Our work is held to the highest standard possible by a team of US and UK human readers, reviewers, and editors.

The same is true for our Amazon promotions: for the avoidance of doubt, as of June 2024 we have advised all participants of our mailing lists that AI is prohibited for the creation of book reviews. While we cannot be held responsible for Amazon content as per our terms, we are doing everything in our power to hold a zero tolerance approach to auto-generated content for our clients.

It is against Amazon policy to share your review as a customer review.

You can share our review as an Editorial Review on your Author page. The author must add the review themselves via their Author Central profile. Follow these instructions from Amazon:

“How can I add / update an Editorial Review?

  1. Click the Books tab.
  2. Select the book you want to update.
  3. Choose the edition you want to change (each edition needs to be updated separately).
  4. Click Edit book details (US-only).
  5. It will display several sections for you to modify:
    • Review
    • Product Description
    • From the Author
    • From the Inside Flap
    • From the Back Cover
    • About the Author
  6. Under Review there are three possible options:
    • Add:
      1. Enter the Editorial Review text.
      2. Add the review source, the name of the person who wrote the review, and the name of the publication, website, or forum where the review appeared.
      3. Click Preview and review your entry.
      4. When you are satisfied, click Save changes.
    • Edit:
      1. Click Edit and make the desired changes to the text.
      2. Click Preview and review the entry.
      3. When you are satisfied, click Save changes.
    • Request a correction:
      1. Click Request a correction and follow the instructions on the form.
      2. We will make the updates for you.

    Your changes appear on Author Central and on your book’s detail page in 3–5 days.

    Important: After you change a section, your publisher will not be able to edit that section. Your publisher can still make changes to other sections, but not to that one. If you think this may cause your publisher a concern, please talk to them before you make changes.”

We now give all authors an Amazon Edit version of their review included with the review for this exact purpose.

Because of the time-consuming nature of posting reviews on Barnes and Noble, we have phased this option out from August 2014. Now, authors can instead quote our review in the editorial section of their page.

Barnes and Noble FAQs

Goodreads policy means we cannot publish a paid review on their site. You can however quote us in your profile.

Goodreads Author FAQs

We cannot do this at this time as it requires a purchase. You can however quote us in your profile or self-interview (dashboard>interview manager in your Smashwords account.)

https://www.smashwords.com/signup/login/profile

Google Play pulls its reviews from Goodreads, and as we cannot post on Goodreads, it is not possible to share the review on Google Play. We have been talking with Google Play recently, and they have been interested in ideas for new ways of sharing reviews. We will keep you posted.

That’s fine, send the manuscript. But be aware that is the book the review will talk about, so check for errors. We also provide editorial reports and proofreads for books that need a professional tweak.

Yes. We have reviewed several books like this. However we will not link to pornographic or sexual service-providing sites as part of the review service.

We will review religious fiction, motivational quotes, and prayer-style books, and some non-fiction religious-themed titles. Check our book policy for more. We do not guarantee a reviewer of faith. We will not link to religious service-providing sites as part of the review.

We have a wide variety of reviewers from different backgrounds. Please let us know if you have a specific reason for choosing a certain type of person for your book review. As an equal rights employer, we cannot employ a reviewer based on sexuality or religion so we may not be able to accommodate this kind of request, but we’ll do our best to find you the best match based on special interests.

Yes. We owe it to the community to talk about the quality of the book in whole including the appearance and edit. If you wish to get a fully professional edit or proofread please look at our editing services here.

Yes, we will. The cover image will reflect part of the professionalism and effort you have put into marketing your book.

We rate books on design (cover art and layout), content (story/characters/narrative style) and editing (spelling, grammar) out of 100 and our review system adds these up to produce a 3-tier star rating adding up to one total star rating out of 5. Ratings are determined by the editor at the time of publication in conjunction with the reviewer.

No. We give authors the option to approve or not approve their review being published for Classic and Lead Story Reviews, so authors will often choose to not have a low-starred review published. If a Jump Start Review or Editorial Review is very critical, authors have the option to not publish their review.

We don’t recommend that authors not approve their review, as even a critical review can help promote the book. Our reviews will always focus on good elements, and never be purely critical, so the exposure can still be positive. However, that decision is up to the author.

If a review is not published, we will still send the author their Amazon edit, star badge, author interview (for Lead Story Reviews), and other info.

If a reviewer does turn in a low-starred review (3 stars or less) you have a number of options. We never publish a 500-word review without asking you what you would like to do next. We promise a fully rounded and honest, impartial review. We strive to serve the self-publishing community of avid readers and writers who champion professional quality to keep self-publishing honorable, so we therefore must give objective reviews. What can you do to improve your book? Do you deep down know some of the comments are true?

You have options to maximize your review’s worth if it has a low star rating:

  1. We can edit your review for our New Releases section as a synopsis-style review of 200 words, or publish your Amazon edit in our Editorial Reviews section. You will be able to keep the 500-word review to cherry-pick quotes for use in the Editorial sections of Amazon, Smashwords, etc. You will still get all the benefits of the review package you bought.
  2. You can pay for a second opinion of another reviewer for 10% less.
  3. We can publish the review, but without the star rating attached. You will still get all the benefits of the review package you bought.
  4. You can avoid publishing it at all and work on your book according to the comments given.
  5. You can go ahead and publish as planned. All publicity can help sell a book.

We publish 70-word Editorial Reviews automatically, so you can let us know if you’d like us to unpublish the review. You will still be able to use the positive aspects of the review on Amazon and in other marketing materials.

We don’t give refunds once an order is queued, as it then being worked on. We certainly won’t refund after the review is complete, as your purchase is a personalized piece of work. However, we can refrain from publishing the review. If a reviewer does turn in a very critical review we will contact you before we publish asking your permission, as it usually means the book might need more work before publicizing it. See the previous answer for more info on what you can do.

All our reviewers have to read all of your book by contract before reviewing it, because it’s their job. We do check each and every review carefully. We employ a close-knit team of professional writers, who have managed workloads to ensure they have the time to turn in a comprehensive review.

When authors are reviewed in a critical way, they can feel their book was misunderstood or not read. Ask yourself, have you conveyed your story on paper, or is it still in your head? Have you communicated what you set out to do? Maybe the reviewer just didn’t like your book. If so, all reviews are balanced and carefully monitored to be as fair as possible. All reviewers read books cover to cover. If a reviewer does turn in a critical review, we will contact you before we publish asking your permission. But a review is an objective opinion of your work – the words that are on paper should tell the full story.

We have a zero tolerance to reviewers who do not read the whole book, and will never allow a book to be reviewed without being read cover to cover.

This is a really common kneejerk reaction to a criticism and we hear it a lot. After all, the critic is calling your baby ugly. It’s unfortunately incredibly easy to not see the wood for the trees after working on a book for so long. Try to step back and see how a reader may comprehend your work. Have you really reached your aims? Re-read the review and think about how the reviewer is seeing the writing. We find most authors come back after a think and realize we had a good point. Many have edited or worked on their books in some way and improved sales and reviews as a result.

The only edits we will make are if we get a fact wrong about the author, or use the incorrect technical word, for example. We owe it to the reading community to be honest about your book so we will not edit a review. You can ask us not to publish it, or you can quote the bits you like on your own sites, such as your website, Amazon Central page and Goodreads. We always get the customer’s permission to publish so you will have an opportunity to choose. You are welcome to re-submit your book for another review or an edit. You are welcome to choose a reviewer. Repeat reviews for the same book get a 10% discount.

That’s okay. You can tell us now and we’ll go ahead with publication. We keep all reviews in draft ready to publish for one year, and on our server forever.

Sorry, you’ll have to resubmit your book. We don’t update reviews of edited versions of books.

Go here to purchase a review. We do not publish free reviews, or reviews written by members of the public.

We offer special deals to clients who have bought a review, including marketing and promotion add-ons and quick fixes. You can see these by clicking here.

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Editing/Conversion FAQs

Yup. However, we only charge $0.01 or $0.02 cpw, which is a third of the going industry rate for a professional editor. We do this because indie should mean things are a little more economical. Check out the EFA going rates to see what I mean.

You will find people willing to edit for less, but monkeys and peanuts is all I’m saying.

No, sorry. You can however pay for the first 50,000 words to be edited first, although I do not recommend this. Sample edits are not useful because if an author needs an editor to find errors, it means the author doesn’t know the errors are there in any case. So why are you asking for a sample edit? It’s not something you can judge against other editing samples, nor can you judge a sample on its own.

You also don’t have professional editing training or experience, which means that you don’t have the criteria to know whether an edit is correctly done or not. Sometimes authors think that the more errors an editor finds, the better. This is not always true. Some editors who offer free sample edits may over-correct a manuscript to show how well they do to land the job, knowing this is a false benchmark that authors look for. They may also under-edit, so as not to offend the author’s sensitive nature, and win the job that way.

This means that free sample edits are prone to give the wrong impression to both the editor and the author, and may lead to false positives in the manuscript.

And I don’t need to work for free. I have many clients, and I’m not hurting for money. This is because I’m an excellent editor. So if you like the look of the service, I suggest you hire me.

No. This is because in the past some authors spoiled it for everyone by sending different parts of their book to different editors for free samples.

I have the following qualifications:

  • MA (Hons) Creative Writing – Novels – Distinction (Prize student) – City University London, UK
  • Postgraduate Screenwriting Certificate  – Grade A – UCLA, Los Angeles, USA
  • BA Hons Design and IT – 2:1 – London Guildhall University UK
  • EFA eBook Formatting Certificate
  • TEFL English language teaching certificate

I am from Cambridge, England, but I have also lived in Los Angeles, and can edit in UK or US English.

I speak Spanish, French, and English fluently. I also speak German. I understand Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Catalan, Valencian, Old English, and Latin.

I am an expert user of all Microsoft and Adobe products.

I have been editing books for twenty-one years, with a focus on indie authors for eleven years.

Go to Word with the document open, and click Tools at the top. Go to Word Count and click it. A box will pop up and show you your word count. If you are not sure, send me the manuscript and I will screengrab the box for you.

Anything under around 60,000 words probably isn’t ready to be a book, although novellas can be between 30,000 and 60,000 words. Anything over 130,000 words is getting into too big. Sometimes, Fantasy books trail in over that line, but any other genre, you’ve probably gone too mad with your writing. Choose a Line Edit to correct too little or too many words. I can tell you where to cut or develop your text.

Our cpw (cost per word) is too low for it to be worthwhile for the editor to contract the work.

  • If you are converting from your original manuscript into either eBook or paperback, we need you to upload the Word document.
  • If you are converting from paperback to eBook, we need you to upload the Word document of the formatted paperback file.

We do not accept any other types of file, including PDFs or kpf for this service.

You should ensure the document you send for conversion is proofread and fully edited, as we DO NOT check the text for errors with this service. Any errors that you need to fix after conversion will incur a charge.

Major changes, such as adding a new page, text, or changing a page or text, will require a new conversion.

The only changes we will make for free are errors in the conversion.

Manuscript to Paperback – You will be sent both a PDF and Word document

Paperback to eBook – You will be sent a .kpf file which is a zipped file designed for Amazon KDP upload only. If you need an EPUB or .mobi, let us know.

Please leave a testimonial here.

You can read testimonials here – and please do click on links to check out the authors listed!

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SPR Amazon Book Promotion FAQs

How It Works – Best Seller Packages

Amazon Promos

  1. Set your book to $2.99 or under (optimal is 99 cents for maximum purchases/reviews)
  2. We will advise you if you need to change category to reach the Top #20 Best Seller Lists
  3. We promote your eBook to readers
  4. You will climb the Amazon Best Seller Lists in your category
  5. Readers will leave Verified Customer Reviews on Amazon.com within the next weeks
  6. Promos are usually completed in 4 weeks

More Info

  • eBooks must be set to either $2.99 or under, or 99c or free according to how you paid above. You can request to pay a supplement to keep the book at the same price with a maximum of $4.99 for smaller packages, but this may not always be advisable.
  • We will contact you two to three days before your promo to ask you to change categories in line with the algorithm’s behavior at that time, only if this is necessary. Category changes are nearly always necessary for ranking, so you must be willing and able to change your category via KDP’s back admin. It is your responsibility to make these changes as per our instructions in time for your promotion or you will lose your spot on the agenda, or, worse, we will promote you and you won’t rank. If this happens and you did not change your category, we will not be held liable for your lack of ranking.
  • Ranking and sales promotions will be completed over a 1-5 day period, but promotions may have up to a 2-week waiting time due to availability.
  • Reviews will take approximately 1-4 weeks to come in after customers have bought and read the book, but we have no control over this timescale.

  1. Set your book to $2.99 or under (99 cents is optimal)
  2. We promote your eBook to readers after around a 2 week wait time
  3. Readers buy and read your eBook, spread out over the month
  4. Readers will leave Verified Customer Reviews on Amazon.com
  5. Reviews normally start coming in a week after the promotion date
  6. Promos are completed in 4 weeks (Please allow time for larger orders)

Note: You need the Best Seller Promotion for ranking – or purchase a 50 Sales Promotion in addition to a Review Promotion.

We will not contact you again after we acknowledge your order, so please only contact us if after 10 weeks you do not see reviews coming in as expected.

Not sure what to do after you purchase your promo? How It Works – SPR Amazon Promos – PDF Download (Large Print)

Want a copy of the Terms of Service for these promotions? Terms of SPR Promotions – PDF Download (Large Print)

A Guide to Best Practices for Best Results – PDF Download

All reviewers are members of the public who signed up for our promotions newsletter and we have no contact or influence over their purchasing or reviewing behavior, and cannot pick or choose the type of person who will review your book, nor can we in any way influence or correct what they will write about your book. This is in Amazon’s Terms of Use, and we cannot and will not break those rules. All reviews must be completely impartial and honest.

We would never use AI to generate reviews. If we notice non-original or inappropriate content on our clients’ book reviews, we flag the review for removal to Amazon. We only allow US or UK based reviewers on the list.

Much has been discussed about AI reviews on Amazon in author forums, and it does seem like the next boogeyman (remember “clickfarms”?!), but in practice these are so obvious that Amazon would most likely delete them immediately on request. These are almost exclusively non-Verified review services, i.e. the reviewer does not purchase the book first.

Having said this, we cannot influence reviewing behavior, and cannot pick or choose the type of person who will review your book, nor can we in any way correct what they will write. This is in Amazon’s Terms of Use, and we cannot and will not break those rules. All reviews must be completely impartial and honest.

We also never use AI for reports or revamp content. Believe it or not, we’re actually talented writers who don’t need AI help.

We market your book to a huge number of avid book fans who enjoy leaving reviews and like your genre of book. So reviews are naturally garnered when we promote the book and readers buy it.

Amazon Terms and Conditions and the unreliable nature of working with the public means we cannot tell you an exact number, but we do keep promoting until we get at least the minimum number shown on the package. Usually, the mid range is reached, sometimes more, but the range gives you a good indication of the number you will reach for each promotion offered.

We will not contact you at all regarding review packages unless there is an issue with your purchase. Please allow 3-6 weeks to see your reviews come in – remember your readers need time to read and review your book. There is a waiting time of 1-3 weeks to be promoted, and these packages are completed as advertised.

We will not contact you regarding bestseller packages unless you need to change categories, or if there is an issue with your purchase. Please allow 1-6 weeks to see your reviews come in – remember your readers need time to read and review your book. There is a waiting time of 1-3 weeks for these packages.

Trying to compare direct sales to reviews ratio of cost is pretty useless given that Customer Reviews are given after purchase. However, from your fees paid after admin, analysis, and your review and social media has been posted, and when you recoup 70% royalties from Amazon, each review and sale will cost you roughly $4. Compared to Google Ads, that can cost anywhere up to $40 a sale (without a review) and Facebook Ads, that can cost up to $10 a sale (without a review) this is very good value for money. These figures are based on the costs for keywords on these services. With this service, you will also get the benefit of our review and social shares, an interview, and a badge.

All reviewers are members of the public who signed up for our promotions newsletter and are not professional reviewers, so will buy and write whatever they want to write. We must not in any way influence or correct what they will write about your book. This is in Amazon’s Terms of Use, and we cannot and will not break those rules. All reviews must be completely impartial and honest. We recommend you buy an Editorial Review to display on your Amazon Page at your Author Central if you want a professionally-written/intelligent review guaranteed. There is a discount available on the page when bought with a Promotion Package.

You are buying a service for the use of our promotional email lists to promote your book, you are not buying reviews. So no.

This service is about getting sales and reviews. We give you averages for sales and reviews and we hit those 99% of the time, and have done since our first client.

We usually target higher-level, relevant categories. This is not the case with inferior services, which use the most obscure categories to rank high.

However, it should be argued that whatever category you rank high in, you will increase your exposure to the next level categories and gradually work up the tree to the highest level, so it’s not altogether useless to rank in a very niche category, however many sales it takes, contrary to recent Internet “outrage.”

As we are promoting to members of the public, we cannot say exactly. It takes time for reviewers to buy and read a book. However, some will read within the first week. If it reaches a very long time (over 6 weeks), let us know, as we track the promotions and can tell you exactly how many reviews we generated with the promotions. Please allow time for your order to start. The waiting time is around 1-3 weeks.

As a rule, the review-only promotions take a lot longer than Best Seller packages, over 1 month rather than 3 days.

You can check this by logging into your KDP Dashboard. Please wait for the promotion to finish first. If you use another service for your eBook, sales may take up to 120 days to show.

Because we make sure that we do everything we can to make sure promotions to readers are genuinely carried out from our mailing lists with no contact made to skew the review content in any way, so that they remain impartial, which is Amazon’s main concern, there is no reason for Amazon to remove the reviews generated from our promotion. However, we are not in control of Amazon’s review policy.

If you self-published, you can log into your KDP Dashboard and see your sales. Please allow 72 hours to ensure Amazon has updated.

If you are published with a press or managed self-publisher such as Ingram or BookBaby, you will have to ask them for your data, or wait for your sales reports to come through as normal. This may take up to 120 days with some services.

You can find out which reviewers came from our promotion with these handy tips.

We only qualify a reader/reviewer for our mailing list who has the following:

  • A current and well-used UK or US Amazon account
  • Orange ‘Verified Purchase’ labels on their reviews
  • A photo/icon on their reviews

You can sort your reviews with the Most Recent and Verified tabs, and look from the date you expected your promotion to run, and usually it will be clear which reviews came from our promotion:

We strongly recommend you do not run any other promotion at the same time as ours so that you can see the results more clearly.

Take a look at the badges shown on the purchase page.

We have reader mailing lists to make sure we can guarantee a minimum amount of sales by experience of knowing how many readers need to be sent the information about your book to get the right percentage of sales for your ranking.

Amazon have set a very odd bag of keywords that don’t seem to match books sometimes. But actually these are set in a guide by Kindle, and make perfect sense to the Kindle algorithm to help your book get seen, and rank well.

It’s best to rank in a niche category and build out to less niche categories as you sell. We pick a category that you will do best in, and branch you up to more generic categories as you go. However, unlike most inferior “bestseller services” we tend to use the higher-level relevant categories to get you visible.

The best way to be sure the reviews came from our promo is to not run any other promotions at the same time.

Here are other ways to tell:

1. Reviews will be Verified only

2. The reviews come in the same three-week window, i.e. they have bought and read the book as a result of the promo.

If you are not sure, ask us and we can use our tracking to confirm, but do remember that reviewer names on Amazon are not the same as email addresses, so it may not be easy to tell sometimes. We cannot contact the reviewers directly as that would be a breach of trust, and against Amazon terms.

Amazon sometimes updates their site, and sometimes for a temporary time, they remove some of the reviews on the site. They usually come back after a few days. If this happens to you, wait for a while and they should come back, because the overwhelmingly most likely reason is that there has been a technical glitch of some kind. Because your reviews will be Verified, it is not likely they will have been removed for any other reason.

Please note, as per our Terms, we do not sell reviews, so we do not ‘replace’ reviews that Amazon removes. We offer promotional services via an email to a mailing list, and we are not privy to Amazon’s decisions to remove or keep a review and have no control over reviewer behavior.

For more on why Amazon sometimes removes reviews, see the following articles.

Missing Reviews – eStore Factory

Help! My Amazon Reviews are missing!

We don’t recommend you use our sales-only packages for ranking as we will not have advised you on categories, and some categories do not behave as expected due to either having too many titles in them (so even 200 sales would not raise your rank much, or for long) or not very many titles (in which case your book would get very high up with only a few sales).

You should use our mailing list services instead, i.e. the reader-reviewer packages for these sorts of ranking climbs, not sales. However, if you use sales in conjunction with review lists, you can climb higher during that promotion.

You will rank for around 1-2 days at your highest position while our readers react to the email promotion. We advise you do not use other promotion services at the same time if you want to see exactly how you did on SPR’s promotion alone.

Amazon’s chart require a sales number per day to stay in the highest position. Depending on your category you may hover in the range of the promised rank for a few days but higher ranks, i.e. #1-5 will require a large amount of sales that usually keep you in place for only a short while. For example, a #1 slot may require 200-400 sales per day. To make sure your book reaches the best position it can, we advise you to price as low as possible and take our advice on category changes.

We will provide a screenshot of your highest rank so that you can display it on your book pages and can boast about your Best Seller status.

We primarily use our mailing lists. We may also use online bid ads such as Facebook, Google, and Goodreads on an intense campaign, until you reach your goal. Sometimes this happens faster than normal, but will happen over a period of 1-5 days usually.

We cannot offer a guarantee on ranking or reviews due to Amazon’s Terms of Service, but we can tell you that the averages shown are 100% accurate.

No, we never would. This technique is illegal, and also it can have a negative effect on your book’s ranking and reputation, and is actually counter-intuitive for use with algorithms.

There is no catch. This service is a hybrid of experience with Amazon algorithms, a few social media tools, and a brilliant reader list.

We give books for charity 10% off SPR Promotions only. Just let us know your charity registration number. We do not discriminate. Any registered charity worldwide is given this discount. If you are a publisher, please join as a Pro Member in order to get a further discount.

Vets also get 10% off, just give us your VA card number or service record reference.

You can pay by PayPal Credit if you live in the USA to spread the payments over six months. We do not run any payment schemes from SPR directly.

We would advise that if you have requested more than 50 reviews in a row for the same book that you contact us to ensure we have enough new reviewers on our list for us to suggest your book to, and get a sale and review. While we can usually accommodate more promos for the mailing list, this depends on your genre, and how reviewers reacted to your book listing previously.

For sales packages, please contact us if you have requested more than 200 sales in a row.

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SPR Amazon Assessment/Blurb FAQs

Keyword, Category, and Blurb Assessments will be delivered in PDF format, and are delivered in 2-3 weeks of your purchase. We do not upload these changes to your Amazon Book Pages. We do not offer full refunds once your book details are submitted as this is a personalized product.

Amazingly, that’s what a re-write is, as advertised! We use the blurb that exists as a working text. We recommend you buy a SPR Jump Start Review if you need an original text.

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Refund Policy at SPR

We do not generally give a refund after your book/information for work is sent to us following payment for any reason except if you buy a duplicate by mistake. This is because we usually send the work to a reviewer/editor within hours of you sending it to us. Once it is sent out, we are obliged to pay the staff member for their work.

We operate from within the EU, and therefore abide by The Consumer Act 2015.

In the first instance, you should plainly and politely ask for a refund. If you have been refused a refund after writing to SPR’s editorial desk, this is because of the following reasons:

  • You are not automatically entitled to a refund just because you have changed your mind about a purchase. Instead, it is down to the goodwill and customer services policy of the retailer.
  • You are not entitled to a refund if you change your mind about your purchase if the item purchased is made to your specifications or personalised, which in the case of SPR products, will be 100% of the time.
  • You are not covered by this Act for digital products.

There are three main points to Consumer Rights:

  • 1. You should know the maximum timescale that the product/service can be delivered in
  • 2. You should know the price charged when you agree to buy it
  • 3. You should receive a product or service that meets a reasonable person’s expectation of that product or service.

Please note that we stand by our right to work without threats or bad behavior from clients. We have a zero tolerance policy on clients that send abuse via email, or threaten us. We reserve the right to end all communication and block your email if you decide to take this route.

If you still feel you should be allowed a refund, please contact legal@selfpublishingreview.com

FTC Guidelines

You may have heard about US FTC guidelines regarding paid book reviews, and sharing these online. These guidelines are exactly that, guidelines, not law, and apply to US citizens and businesses only, and only for sponsored content. The definition of “sponsored content” or “paid content” is content written by the client and posted on a website in a paid space for the sole purpose of advertising a product with the client’s chosen words. This does not apply to original and impartial content written by professional reviewers. There is another set of guidelines used for reviews and endorsements in the US. You can read them here.EASA regulations

Because SPR is based in the EU, we are not legally bound by these guidelines, but because around 80% of our clients are in the US, we advise you to read this information. The EU market is self-regulated, and so as business owners, we comply with basic guidelines as set out by the EASA.

Also see: Is Self-Publishing Review Legit?

Getting in Touch

Please note that if you have an issue not covered here, we operate solely on email, answering all queries within 2 working days, i.e. Mon- Fri. This is because we are based in the EU, and while we have satellite offices in the US and Canada, our head office operates during a different timezone to 80% of our clients. We do not have a phone service. You can contact us here.

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