How to Get Reviews for Your Book: 5 Helpful Tips
The success of your creative writing career goes hand-in-hand with readers’ reactions to your work, especially what they say about it and how they rate it. While the quality of your book, story, or poem can ensure positive reactions, you can also take steps to collect those all-important reviews.
Here are preparations you should make and strategies it’s possible to follow before and after your book launches.
1. Prepare Your Book’s Pitch, Blurb, and Synopsis
To get reviews, you first need to convince people to read your work. This means coming up with a great pitch and blurb, if not a synopsis as some reviewers might ask for one.
It helps if you write these beforehand and adapt them as necessary. Browsenote-taking apps like Notion and OneNoteto find the best one for the job and prepare your blurb and synopsis.
They need to highlight, powerfully but concisely, what makes this book special and why readers should care about it. Think about its key themes, protagonist, and popular literature to compare it to.
The blurb and synopsis are good for book review services where you need to draw the eye of users. But how well you know your own work also influences the wording and effectiveness of any pitches you make.
The process isn’t that different fromcold pitching your way to career success. You research target readers to find those that accept your genre and to check whether they already have instructions for submitting review requests.
Then, you reach out with a cover letter that contains your pitch, customized to spark the interest of each reader.
2. Add a Call to Action to Your Book
Another step that can lead to natural reviews for your book is to use its own pages to tell readers how important ratings are and ask them to post their impressions onthe best book review sitesaround.
All you need are a few lines that encourage readers to support your book by reviewing it. To draw attention to the message, it’s best to use a blank page at the end or beginning of the book—or both.
If it’s an ebook, you could even hyperlink the websites you suggest to your readers, making it easier for them to jump over and leave their stars and feedback quickly.
3. Approach People and Websites for Reviews Before Your Book Launches
The hardest part of getting reviews for your book is actively approaching people. It involves research, social skills, and luck as it’s possible to’t predict reviewers’ schedules, which makes it a good idea to start review-hunting before you even release the book.
Assuming your work is awesome, getting pre-launch reviews and ratings ensures people will feel more comfortable buying it as soon as it’s available. In addition to quicker sales, you might generate natural reviews faster, too.
Now, how do you reach out to book reviewers? As already mentioned, go for people within your genre and follow their submission instructions. If they don’t have any because, say, they don’t normally review books but would probably enjoy yours, be extra polite and tactful.
Whether the reviewer is experienced or not, provide a perfect cover letter that quickly introduces you, entices the potential reviewer with key elements from your book, and asks for their review.
Most importantly, there should be no errors, especially grammatical ones, as they instantly reduce the reviewer’s faith in the quality of your book and skills as a writer. If they have a lot on their plate, it’s a good enough reason to reject your request.
As for the manuscript itself, if you want a pre-launch review, it should also be pristine, requiring no more than a minor round of proofreading before publication. In the latter’s case, inform the reviewer that it’s an unproofread final draft.
An already published book should have no flaws whatsoever. However, if the story is fantastic, one or two little errors here and there are usually forgiven.
Finally, you have access to platforms like:
They offer different pre-launch book review services. They make it easier to promote your work by offering people advance reader copies (ARCs), but you still need to convince them that your book is worthwhile.
4. Promote Your Book on Social Media
Start generating hype for your book long before its launch date to ensure you get the attention of as many people as possible, some of them potential reviewers.
In addition to manually searching Google for book review opportunities—they could be publishing professionals, newspaper editors, and even academics—don’t forget about social media.
Just usingInstagram can boost your career as an author, including your team of reviewers. But making your book appealing in your posts is still essential to persuading followers to read it and share their experiences.
If you build enough of a fan base, asking for reviews should yield results quickly. You could create an ad calling for reviewers or a simple poster reminding readers that leaving reviews for their favorite authors is essential.
When you create this post, make sure you include helpful links, for example, to review platforms you prefer. Also, use relevant hashtags, like #bookreview, #bookblogger, and #readingcommunity. Find out what’s most popular to reach a broader audience.
Whatever your intent and strategy, post the content on your network. Twitter and Instagram are the most effective for authors, but Facebook and LinkedIn can be handy, too.
5. Be Careful With Paid Reviews
Self-publishing has one minefield to be especially careful of: paid reviews. One reason why readers trust big-time reviewers is that they usually already have a job and don’t need to be paid for their effort. So, their opinions on books are unbiased, not just backed by experience.
While reading and rating a book is time-consuming, directly paying the reviewer to do so is generally frowned upon because their opinion could then be partial. Even if it truly isn’t, some readers won’t trust a review if they find out you bought it.
Even when dealing with book review services like those mentioned above, it’s a good idea to check what the rewards and rules are for reviewers, not to mention if and how much you need to pay.
If a platform firmly encourages honest reviews and offers perks to readers in a way that keeps them objective, it’s safe enough to use. They might let you tip your reviewer at your discretion, a common feature, but it’s less compromising than paying them a proper fee.
Another problem to prepare for when trying to get reviews for your book on social media—Instagram in particular—is that paid reviewers with low-quality services will bombard you with messages.
You could block these accounts or try something more diplomatic. For example, create an eye-catching post clearly stating that you don’t want paid reviews and pin it to your profile. Your inbox should be easier to get through after that.
At the end of the day, look for book reviewers with experience in your genre that are either free or part of a very reliable service. If you have no choice but to approach a paid reviewer, research them thoroughly, from their testimonials to their past projects.
Learn Everything About Book Reviews
Writing a book is hard, but making it successful can be a nightmare for the unprepared. Explore the publishing industry for every tool and tip that can help you predict and navigate your journey, starting with how to get good reviews for your book.
Besides pinpointing reliable reviewers, look at what book lovers like to see and use—your target audience especially. Do they prefer simple or extravagant covers, printed or digital books? Design yours accordingly and you’re more likely to get natural reviews.
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