How to Get Book Reviews to Market Your Self-Published Book

How to market a book- Marketing Strategies to SELL

You have put your heart and soul into writing your book. As much as you are proud of the final outcome you surely must not fail at marketing this book of yours. Here is the first and vital step you must do. Let’s face it. Readers do go through book reviews before picking up a book. It could be from their favourite blogs or from Good Reads, or they may just search for a review online and hit upon a site. Even if a book is gifted, you probably still do try to gather a review about it online or from Amazon. I often tend to look out for how many stars a title has been given (though I take this with a pinch of salt- with the number of fake reviews that float around these days). I just hope most are legit. The NY Book Editors have further suggestions on marketing a book. 

Book reviews as marketing strategy

Book reviews are vital to any author who would love to create a larger audience for their published title. In fact it is important to include it as part of their book marketing strategy. This obviously makes more sense for self-published authors as they generally do not have a big budget for marketing or, have a big publication backing them. If you are a self-published author, then shy not away from a book review, as it gives your potential buyers an insight into what your writing is all about.

Reasons to seek book reviews for self-published authors

For a self-published author, a newbie or novice author, word-of mouth marketing is indeed the best form. It can persuade others to pick the book and read. Bloggers reviews too aid in this as readers do catch up on reviews regularly. As a matter of fact, a good review could just spin off a good fortune for your book. It may just persuade readers to buy, read and recommend the same to others- a sort of snow ball effect. Thus it makes sense for very author to focus on reviews from bloggers and readers across platforms and include them as part of their book marketing strategy.

Book Reviews are subjective in nature

Also, one must remember a very important fact here. Any sort of review is subjective. Thus if a reader thinks and believes that your book isn’t up to the mark, or the plot fails, or other reasons, remember that it is just their opinion. Probably, another reader may just pen the opposite. On the contrary I believe, authors may use this as a yard stick to improve their game and evaluate constructively, areas that could have been dealt with better. The same also applies when a book receives rave reviews. As much as it feels awesome, do look into your work constructively and check if they are indeed worth it. The bottom line from all this is believe in yourself and try working on your game every single day.

Questions to ask before requesting for a review

• What is the weight of the opinion on you and your book? Do you entirely trust the judgement?
• Where will the review be posted? What will the audience be for this?

As a book blogger for the past five years, I have read and reviewed over 200 books. If you are an author and wish to have your book reviewed reach out to me on ramya@meotherwise.com. If your genre suits my interest I would be happy to review the same. 

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