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Most authors think that writing a book is the hard part.
As an independent author, getting reviews for your book is probably one of the hardest things you'll ever have to do.
Where do you start? Who do you ask? How does it even work?
This is a complete step by step systematic process to give you a near unlimited amount of reviews for your book.
They're right — it's a herculean task to get a book out of your head, onto the page, and in a format that other people can use.
But it's not the hardest part of being an author. In today's world, where self publishing is so accessible to authors at any level and in any genre, the real problem is getting attention for your book.
After all, the best-written, most valuable book on Earth isn't worth anything if nobody cracks it open and starts to read it.
While there are a number of strategies out there to get attention for your book, one of the best is to leverage the way that Amazon works when you launch a book on their platform.
Amazon determines where your book ranks in its category on a few key factors. Honest, in-depth reviews of your book are one of those key factors (alongside book sales).
If you're a first-time author, or an experienced writer without a large platform, this might discourage you . It can feel like a chicken and egg situation. No one will see your book if you can't get reviews, but you can't get book reviews because people aren't seeing your book.
How do you break the cycle?
In this article, we'll go over simple, practical, and (most importantly) ethical ways on how to get reviews for your book on Amazon.
Be warned: this will take effort. But if you put in the work and follow the steps, you will get genuine reviews for your book, catapulting up the rankings and in front of the readers you want to reach.
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Later in this article, we'll cover a step-by-step process to get free book reviews. But first, let's cover the many ways that authors try to get reviews for their books.
Almost all authors start out here, and for good reason. Without much of a platform to market their work, they go to their trusted circle of family, friends, and acquaintances.
This is effective, because these people have a personal connection to you and are willing to help you out even if they may not be one of your target readers.
Note: It is frowned upon to ask your close connections to review your book if they haven't read it. Just because they're likely to leave a review no matter what doesn't mean that you should allow it.
Over the past 5-7 years, the number of people who make a living writing books and selling them on Amazon has risen drastically. Naturally, so has a support network aimed at helping these authors scale their success. Book blogging communities can take many forms, from outright self-promotion bordering on shady tactics, to large, reputable book mailing lists like BookBub. As a general rule, these should be approached with caution unless you have a proven book that you know will work well with a specific site or book marketing list.
Most articles teaching you how to get a book reviewed will recommend Amazon Top Reviewers as a core part of the strategy. It's not a bad idea, but it becomes less and less effective the more people use it. Think about it — there are a finite number of top reviewers, and an ever-increasing list of authors who want reviews for their books. At some point this model breaks. Your pitches offering free books in exchange for an honest review will start falling on deaf ears because there are simply too many other authors looking for the same thing. However, an intelligent approach to Top Reviewers should still be considered.
Book review services take two forms:
Hopefully we don't have to explain why purchasing #1 is a bad idea. Not only does it go directly against Amazon's promotional content and customer review policies, it's not very effective. You're buying reviews from people who have never read the book, so it's likely to be a very generic and obviously fake review. Amazon's good enough to detect those, even on an IP-level for some of the more popular services. Just don't use them.
However, services that offer to speed up the review process can be worth their weight in gold, like BookRazor (shameless plug). The tactics we'll get into in the next section are very time consuming, so anything that can speed up the process without sacrificing quality is a good use of money. These can take the form of services that find reviewers for you, provide templates for emailing, etc — they're quite diverse.
Having worked with many authors on book launches and obtaining reviews, there are a few common misconceptions and beliefs that prevent authors from getting the most they can out of their books. Give these a quick read and see if you have any of them within you:
This is a common struggle for many creative types. Often, they feel it's unethical or sleazy to ask their friends, family, or acquaintances for help with their project. They have so much trouble with even those groups that the thought of asking "random strangers" for help is completely out of the question. If this is something you struggle with, remember that other people ask you for help all of the time. It's in our nature to respond favorably to requests for help, especially when you're offering something in return.
The most common objection we get when sharing our book review techniques is, "Won't this hurt my book sales? I want to sell as many copies as possible!" While the logic isn't false, it is a bit twisted. When an author is starting out, eyeballs and visibility are often far more important than raw book sales. Would you rather get 100% of book sales to an audience of 100 people, or 50% of an audience of 2,000?
Phew! Now that we've gotten all of the introductory information out of the way, let's get to work, shall we? This framework will work for any authors that puts in the time and effort required to make it a success. Before we get into each step, here is a rough outline:
Looks simple? It is. But the little details in each step are what separates a successful review campaign from a failure. Let's get into it.
Because we're dealing with a complex ask (reading and reviewing a book), it makes sense to give people as much as possible to get this task done. A good rule of thumb is to start the review process at least two months beforehand. This gives you enough time to get your list of people together, make your pitches, and follow up 2-3 times. Then you need to allow time for them to read and digest your book. Only then can they review it. If you try to rush the process, your results will be drastically worse.
While this guide is written for authors who have yet to launch their book, the principles work equally well if your book is already out and you're looking for more reviews. Just follow steps 2-5 and modify your email templates to the following:
The goal here is to start with as big a list of people as you can come up with. Not everyone will respond to your first pitch, not everyone will want a copy of your book, and there will even be some people who don't review your book after receiving a copy. This is unavoidable, but by coming up with a large list of initial people you can mitigate these problems a bit.
There are a few sources you should look to to build this list:
The people on this list are your "tier one" reviewers. It's highly likely that they will not only respond to your pitch, but will enthusiastically help you by reviewing your book and sharing it with their networks as well. Add as many people to this list as you can think of, but be sure not to head over to Gmail and add all of your contacts while thinking, "If I've emailed them, they must be 'acquaintances', right?" Wrong!
Where this system really shines is in this step right here. Go to Amazon and browse through your book categories for popular books that are similar to your own. Here's what you're looking for:
These criteria ensure that the reviewers you find are relevant and interested, making them exceptional candidates to review your book. When you find these reviewers, look for:
After you've exhausted the reviews on one book, move to another book until you run out of similar books that have reviews. This is by far the most time consuming part of the process, but doing good work here will pay dividends for the rest of the process.
Once you've completed the arduous process of compiling a review pitch list, it's time to communicate with them! Your first email will introduce yourself, your book, and offer a copy of the book. It will NOT talk about how much you love your book, how badly you need reviews, or anything else that you want from them. It's designed to offer value to your list — that's it.
IMPORTANT: The below email templates are merely suggestions. I strongly encourage you to compose your own. The below may have been copied and re-used to death.
Think of the credibility and authenticity you lose when a potential reviewer has already received the same email outreach from hundreds of different authors.
Subject: My New Book
Hi [First Name],
Hope you're well! [Add a personal intro sentence here].
Over the past [time period], I've been working on a book called [title of book], about [one sentence description of book topic]. It's going to launch in [number of weeks] on Amazon.
The way publishing a book works these days, one of the most valuable things I can do is launch the book with reader reviews on Amazon.
That's why I'm writing you. Would you like to receive a free copy of my book? I would be happy to send you either a digital copy or a physical copy — whichever you prefer.
If so, I'd also sincerely appreciate it if you considered leaving an honest review once it launches on [Date]. It's by no means necessary, but would be much appreciated.
If you want a physical copy, just reply with your address and I'll ship it out to you ASAP. If you'd prefer a digital copy, just reply and let me know and I'll send it right out to you.
Thanks so much for your time!
[your name]
The key to this email is the suggestion that they be receptive to leaving a review for your book once they're done reading it. While it's frowned upon to outright agree to trade a book for a review (even if it's unbiased), it's completely fine to suggest that a review would be appreciated.
Don't send this as a mass email. It reeks of non-personalization and your success rate will go way down. The opening line in this email should be as personal as possible. That's easy to accomplish if you're writing to family or friends, but gets more time consuming when you are emailing reviewers you found on Amazon. It helps to do a little Googling and figure out what these people are about. Is there a commonality that you share? Something they enjoy? That little bit of personalization is a signal that you didn't email the same script to 500 people, and drastically increases your response rate.
Keep your list in a spreadsheet and track the following:
Prepare to get a lot of responses. People are usually receptive to a custom email pitch like the one above. Once people start saying "Yes," make sure you send them the book as soon as possible.
If you're sending digitally, send them a zipped file of the three popular digital formats (.pdf, .epub, and .mobi) so you don't have to go back and forth with them over file types. It would be helpful to include quick instructions on how to use each filetype, just in case they don't know.
Remember — you're asking them to read your book and leave a review. These are NOT small asks. Do everything in your power to make the process as painless as possible for them.
The first round of emails was all personal outreach. One on one. Now that you have a subsection of that original list that has accepted a book in exchange for an honest review, it's safe to add them to an email list and mail them all at once.
A free and easy to manage option is MailChimp. Just copy and paste all of the names and emails that accepted your offer into your Mailchimp list and name it "[Book title] Reviewer List."
Like everyone else, your reviewers are busy people. If you ship out a copy and hope they'll remember to leave a review the day your book launches, your results will be poor. It's best to send a few gentle reminders, prodding them to fulfill their end of the bargain — leaving a review of your book once it launches.
Subject: [First name], [Book Title] Launches in a Week!
Hey [First name],
I wanted to say thanks for agreeing to read [Book Title]. I can't tell you how much it means to me to get this book out in the world on [Date].
I'm writing you to see if you had any questions or feedback before the book launches. If you are open to leaving a review but are not sure what to say about the book or in a review in general, it's totally fine to just leave your general thoughts.
One last thing: if you decide to leave a review, it's important to mention that you received a review copy of the book.
Take care,
[Your name]
There are two main points to hit in this email:
You'd be surprised how forgetful people can be, even when it comes to things that they really want to do. Giving them a gentle reminder helps prime them to take action.
The day your book launches, you want to email your list and let them know one final time that your book is out and they have committed to leaving a review. It's best to schedule this the night before for 6 or 7am EST so your email is staring them in the face first thing in the morning. This way they can leave their review and be on with their day.
Subject: It's Launch Day For [Book Title]
Hey [First name],
Morning! I wanted to send a quick and easy reminder that [Book Title] has launched and is available on Amazon! Thank you again for giving it a look before launch. It means a lot.
If you'd like to leave your thoughts on the book in a review, you can do so here (it would be greatly appreciated):
Click here to leave a review for [Book Title].
Again, I can't tell you how much it means that you've taken the time to help out with the book launch. If there's anything that I can do for you, please don't hesitate to ask.
Thank you,
[Your name]
This email should be short and to the point. All you want them to do is read it, give them a gentle nudge to review your book, have them click the link, and review your book. Simple.
If you've done your job, reviews should start coming in over the course of the next day or two. It's time to thank your list. At this point, it's best to go back to a personal email instead of a mass-email. This way you can connect more with your reviewers, who by now may be genuine fans of your work.
If you want to take it even further, you can send everyone on your list an email, even if they didn't end up reviewing your book. This personal touch often spurs another segment of the list to leave a review. Even though it might be late, it still helps your book rank higher in your Amazon category.
As you can see, this isn't a quick and easy process. But that's what makes it valuable. Simply put, most authors launching books on Amazon don't go through even half of this effort to get their book out there, and consequently end up with a lackluster book launch. They get discouraged and may stop writing altogether, or decide that it's just "impossible" to be an author these days.
With self-publishing bringing the barriers to entry to book publishing way down, there are many more authors these days than there ever were in the past. You can choose to see that as a problem, lamenting how hard it is to get noticed these days, or you can do the work that other authors won't — and reap all of the rewards.
If you want to streamline this process a bit without sacrificing the essence of what makes it work, you can use a service like ours which does the reviewer sourcing for you. You'll still have to do the rest of the pitching yourself, but we've become experts at finding Amazon reviewers that are interested in your book category and topic, and have a history of leaving honest reviews for new authors.
Once again, if you don't have the time, we specialize in providing a cheap, done for you version of this.
If you value your time at more than $4.00/hour, then our service is the better bang for the buck.
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(we need ~15,000 total book reviews to research)
$99.99
MOST POPULAR!
potential reviewers
(we need ~40,000 total book reviews to research)
$224.99