An effective offline method of publicising and advertising your books to sell even more copies, is via book reviews

To have a chance at selling lots of copies of your book on Amazon, you’ll need lots of book reviews.  Bagging lots of book reviews is a vital ingredient of your marketing plan for the following reasons.

1. Book reviews raise awareness about your book. Readers who read book reviews do so because they are interested in buying books. 

2. Book reviews provide information about your book that readers can use to make a decision. 

3.  Book reviews provide immediate access to your book.  Most book review sites raise money through affiliate programs, so most will include an Amazon affiliate link with your review. 

4. Book reviews provide credibility for your book.  Many libraries and bookstores expect to see excerpts of book reviews with media kits to help them determine which books to stock. A well-written, but bad review, will still point out some good things about your book.

5.  Book reviews provide feedback.  While a single review is only one person’s opinion, if the same things pop up in multiple reviews, authors will be made aware of potential problems, which they can take action to rectify. 

Here’s a two-step method that I recommend you follow in order to get book reviews:

1) Find bloggers who are related to your book, or who have reviewed other books in a similar genre, with a Page Rank of three or more. If your main character is a doctor, contact doctor blogs. If your character is a psychic, write to psychic blogs, etc. Page Rank 3 (PR3) is the best ranking to aim for because once a blog hits PR4 they receive a lot of advertising requests. PR3 blogs are more likely to respond with a ‘yes!’

2) To ask for the review firstly tell them who you are and ask if they’d be interested in receiving a free copy of your book. Also mention that if they like it, you’d really appreciate a review on Amazon. Keep it short and to the point.  Perhaps you could also give the reviewer a summary, page count, genre, and the ISBN number of the book.  Provide a link to your website for more information. It’s a good idea to give the message a personal slant, as if you’re writing to a friend rather than a stranger. Also bear in mind that most people prefer to receive a physical book.

Getting book reviews is a numbers game. Big commercial publishers often send out at least five-hundred review copies. Most indie authors can’t afford to send such a vast quantity, but it’s usually pretty affordable to send out ten or twenty copies to targeted blogs, plus email hundreds of other blogs with a digital copy.

At the beginning it’s all about  getting a following. You need reviews and support first then after you have that, you can focus your time and energy on selling your book and making money!

Love & Light

The Word Queen xx