Being an Author: Book Reviews & Feedback

Book reviews can be more important than you may think. Reviews are great for any writer. It allows feedback from people who don’t know you and those who do know you to show support, but being honest. It is the only way you can improve as a writer. They can take many forms. Book reviews can be brief or long. They can critique and/or summarize the book. They can be written by readers or professional book reviewers. Reader reviews are more personal, focusing on the individual reader’s experience while reading the book. But since readers can have such widely differing views of the same book, it is valuable for all involved when a book has various reader reviews available.

Saving Time for Readers

Book reviews make books a known quantity. They decrease the risk to readers that a particular book will be not what they had in mind. Book reviews help potential readers become familiar with what a book is about, show them how they might react to it and determine whether this book will be the right book for them right now. Book reviews save readers time, prepare them for what they will find and offer them a greater chance of connecting with a particular book, even before they read the first page!

Greater Chance of Being Found

Book reviews give books greater visibility and a greater chance of getting found by more readers. On some websites, books with more book reviews are more likely to be shown to prospective readers and buyers than books with few or no book reviews. Book reviews also help amplify your book’s reach among book clubs, bookstores, blogging communities and other opportunities to gain attention from new readers. For an author, book reviews can open doors to new and bigger audiences.

More Sales

Books with a lot of book reviews appear to be popular books. It’s human nature for people to be curious about what looks popular and want to check it out for themselves. A good number of book reviews can help lead to a snowball effect of book sales. In other words, the presence of book reviews can help validate the worthiness of a book and establish the book’s audience. Once validated, other similar people are much more likely to join their peers and buy that same book.

Knowing this, some authors try to game the system by outright buying or inventing book reviews. But that’s not a good approach. Don’t do it. It’s not right and you’re better than that. Soliciting real reviews from real people can help you as an author’s achieve more sales in a completely ethical way.

Why No Review…

Now for those avid readers out there, I know that we often do not leave reviews, and it may not even be that the book was bad. The book could have been the best book series ever to you, but it slipped your mind. Well here are some reasons that I have researched as to why people do not leave reviews. If you fit into one of these, I am providing a solution so that maybe one of your favorite authors can get a review from you.

Problem: When reading a series, zooming through it, and as the person is consuming the books one after another, they don’t stop to review the books.

Solution: Read the series — Great! There’s nothing better than being sucked into a series. When you get to the end of the series, review the entire series at once. Write one review for the whole series, like this: “This is a review of the entire [name here] series: I found it amazing!” Then paste the review in each of the books’ review spaces and leave your star ratings. Sure, that’s not the most detailed of review for each book, but you left a review, and that’s what matters most.

Problem: When you get a book as a gift from someone, it’s believed that you can’t leave a review on Amazon.

Solution: Not true! Amazon actually doesn’t care whether you purchased the product from them or not when you write your review. And Goodreads doesn’t have this problem.

Problem: The author already has a million reviews and you feel like yours won’t matter at all.

Solution: Not true! Sure, the review won’t matter as much to the author who has over 100 reviews as your review will matter to the author who has only 48, but it will still matter.

Problem: The author is with a major publisher, so who cares if I leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads?

Solution: Also, not true! All the reasons that reviews matter to small-press and indie authors also matter to authors at major publishers. These authors need reviews, too.

Problem: You forget. You’re in a hurry. You’re lazy, eager to move on to the next book.

Solution: Just do it. A few words will do — and you can cut-and-paste that exact same review to Goodreads. Do it and move on.