How to Get Legitimate Book Reviews

Book reviews are a lifeline for finding readers and boosting future book sales for writers of all genres, especially for children's books. However, finding sources for these reviews can be daunting. There is an overabundance of so-called book reviewers out there ready to write a review for you for a price. But these paid reviews are often expensive or carry little weight with those readers looking for a good book, making paid reviews a less-than-profitable method of accumulating needed reviews. In my experience, some avenues work better than others, and that is what I am discussing today.

Why are Reviews so Important?

As a writer, reviews are what bring readers to your book. Reviews are how potential readers evaluate whether your book fits their reading preferences, if they think the book in question is of value, and if it genuinely compares to its marketing information, because those writing the reviews have presumably read the book and chosen to write their thoughts and opinions about it for others to use as a buying guide. This makes it even more important that the reviews you receive are legitimate and come from honest sources. If all of the reviews linked to your work look to have been bought, then those reviews are less likely to have a positive impact on your book's popularity and sales. And could actually have the opposite effect.

What's the Difference between Paying for a Review and Paying for Marketing?

Paying for a review is basically paying someone to claim they have read your book and write a positive comment about the book, whether they actually read it or not. It can include additional items such as social media postings and mentions on their website, but paid reviews are exactly what they sound like: paying for someone to talk nicely about what you have written.

Paying for marketing, on the other hand, is where you are paying for exposure for your book. It can include a critic's or editorial review or reviews from their readers, but what you are paying for is not the reviews themselves. What you are paying for is the reach that the marketer or publicist has within their social media, company website, and overall follower base. Again, they should not request that you lower the price of your book to meet their criteria. Their reader base should be substantial and easily verified, and what they are offering in exchange for the requested fee should be straightforward and include more than a review or the ability to be reviewed by their followers or mailing list recipients.

Additionally, you want their subscribers to fit your niche. This means you want to market your romance book via a source that specializes in the romance genre, not one that focuses on historical non-fiction or your children's book to a parental audience, not to an erotic fiction fan base. You want to make sure that the people being exposed to your book are actually potential buyers and that you're not just more SPAM filtering through their system. Otherwise, you're wasting your money because the wrong people are being targeted.

How to Spot Quality Review Opportunities?

There are a lot of companies out there offering an abundance of reviews once you've paid for a subscription to their service or paid a fee. These services make big promises and sometimes guarantee sales improvements but often require your book to be substantially discounted to readers or even free to qualify for these sales promotions. This may increase the number of books you sell, but the profits will be non-existent, because your royalties for zero-dollar books are zero. And if you have paid a fee, you are now running on a negative profit margin, because your books brought in no revenue, while you spent money to do this.

Legitimate reviewers will sometimes request a small fee to cover their time spent reading your book, or ask for an ARC (Advanced Release Copy) in order to read your book and review it. They will not make a lot of promises or ask you to reduce the price of your book so that they can promote it for you. They will provide you with a usable review, as well as place that review on their social media and reviews pages. Good reviewers will also add the review to your book's Amazon listing.

Methods for Accumulating Beneficial Reviews.

So far, the best source I have found for legitimate reviews outside of your regular readers' fan base is Goodnightreads. Unlike other sites that I have come across, this site provides authors the opportunity to read and review other authors' works in exchange for having their own work read and reviewed. It IS NOT a you read mine, and I'll read yours trade. It is a double blind situation where books are placed in an online library queue without the author's name for readers looking for a book to select from. Once the book has been read and reviewed, the reader receives tokens to be able to place their book in the library for review, and so on. These reviews are placed either on Goodreads or on the book's Amazon listing, whichever platform the reader has chosen to post on. The more books you read and review, the more opportunities for others to read and review your book you have. And these reviews are quality, honest reviews that count in the Goodreads and Amazon rankings calculations, which is where exposure and ultimately sales happen in the online book marketing world.

Another, albeit more cumbersome method is to reach out to book clubs that focus on your genre and

offer them an ARC in exchange for a review. Offering a free ARC to each reader in the club in exchange for being added to their reader's list library and a review by anyone who reads it is another way to spark a book club's willingness to work with you. The key here is to do your research before reaching out with your proposal, because these book clubs and their organizers are inundated with upstart authors looking for free reviews. The more in tune with their readers you are and the genre they specialize in, the more likely you are to get a positive response or a response at all, for that matter.

If you have a list of individuals who have already bought your book, this is usually sales you have made directly, like family and friends, or book signing mailing lists; follow up with them and remind them to post their book reviews on Amazon and Goodreads once they have finished reading your book. Reassure them that there are no hard feelings or bad reviews, only growth and learning opportunities, so not to be afraid or nervous about leaving a review no matter what they thought of your work. This may be a bit hard to swallow as a writer, but it is the truth. Fear may also be what is holding back your friends and family from posting their reviews. Encourage them to write an honest yet kind review, meaning if there was anything at all they liked about it, focus on that, with a gentle explanation of why the star rating may not have been what was hoped for. Remember ALL reviews are based on opinion and preference, and even though they ultimately impact your overall scores, the bad reviews are equally as important as the good reviews, if not more so.

Reach out to genre-specific professional reviewers who will review your book in exchange for an ARC copy. It may take them several months to complete the review because of the number of books they have in their queue, and they may not offer to post the review anywhere, but you will have a valuable tool for promoting your book to post on your own social media, as well as to use in future blurbs, news releases, etc. This is especially effective when done before a book's release to help build hype and generate interest in the book once it is available.

The Importance of Reviews for Children's Books

I mentioned children's books in the opening paragraph and want to circle back to that. What makes reviews so much more important for children's books than for any other type of publication is the audience and consumer purchasing the book. Parents want to ensure they're providing quality content to their children and not just filling their child's bookshelves with content that may be poorly written, inappropriate content, or content that may not align with their family's belief system.

In a bookstore, it is easy enough, yet time -consuming, to thumb through the shelves of books to find the right material for their child. Online, it is not so easy. Online, there is minimal content for them to review, so they have to rely on reviews from other parents or those who have already read the book to make their buying decision. This makes quality children's book reviews extremely important.

As a writer of children's books and a former primary editor of the genre, I find GoodNightReads to be an excellent resource for children's book writers to build their initial review base. They offer both a free and a paid membership. Both memberships operate the same, with the difference being that the paid membership plans allow you to post more than one book into the reader's library at one time, whereas the free version allows for only one book that cannot be switched out. They offer two different paid memberships in addition to the free version.

To help my fellow writers out with their overhead costs, I am including my GoodNightReads referral link here, along with my Invite Code: ELIZABETHL687. The provided referral link and invite code provide a 50% discount off the first month for any paid memberships, allowing you to explore this opportunity at a reduced rate. They are currently looking for children's authors to enhance their library offerings, making this an excellent time to try the process out. To use the provided link, simply click on one of the underlined GoodNightReads links within this blog post article or copy and paste the invite once you're on their website when registering.

Now that you know why book reviews are so important, how to tell the difference between a quality review opportunity and a mass marketing scam, and you have a few ideas to get you started on the path to legitimate book reviews, it's time for you to get started.