Friday, November 14, 2014

How to Find a Book Reviewer

If you are unfortunate enough not able to afford to work as a full-time writer, you might have spent weeks, months, possibly a year working on your book in your spare time.  

While working on your story, you should have also built your author platform, and created a following. Building your author platform after your book is finished is too late to get started building a readership list of interested readers who kept up with your progress hungrily waiting to read the finished book.

Your author platform is a place to find readers who may be willing to reviewer your book and tell others about your book.

Having a following is part of your marketing and promotion plan for your book, which is what publishers will want to know. Agents will want to see what comes up when they Google you. Depending on what an agent finds may determine whether they leave and not choose to work with you, or take a chance on you and your book to a publisher.

How to Find a Book Reviewer

As of November 13, 2014, searching Google for “Book Reviewer” delivers 16,400,000 results. A list this large can be daunting at best. How do you choose from a list of 16.4 million reviewers and choose one or two to contact to review your book. How do you contact a reviewer? Once again, this is where you author platform is the answer. Create a post on your author platform that you are seeking reviewers and promote the post. Be positive in stating you are seeking honest unbiased reviews only, and state the genre, if you write “Romance” do you want a reviewer the reads Sci-Fi, or Westerns reviewing your book.

Figuring out which reviewer to choose:

·         Your followers – They’re already interested
·         Social Media – Your followers
·         Asking for reviewers on the internet can be dicey
·         Ask other authors who they used
·         Ask if a reviewer reads and reviews your specific genre
·         Ask to see a reviewers past work
·         Ask a reviewer where they post reviews
·         Some reviewers are not allowed to post on Amazon
·         Tell the reviewer where your book can be found and ask them to post there
·         Ask the reviewer if they send you a copy of the review before it is posted
·         Ask for a link to the posted review

Asking your family and friends for reviews is a horrible idea because you should wonder if they are truly unbiased and honest, or just telling you something being kind. Reviews that are all five star can actually hurt when readers other than family and agents read your book.

Find someone who reviews your genre. Not all reviewers read and review all genres. You should receive honest, unbiased, and professional reviews. The reviewer should send you a copy before posting it around the internet. Reviewers should help you get the word out about your book and intrigue readers to purchase your book.

This goes back to your author platform and visibility to potential readers, which every writer needs if they want to sell books. Yes, I keep harping about “author platform”, that is because writing is important to you, you wrote the book. Therefore, let people know about it before you start writing your book, and peaking interest while keeping potential readers up to date on the progress.

Author
Robert Medak
Freelance writer, Blogger, Editor, Proofreader, and Reviewer