QUESTION: I’ve self-published a children’s book and would like to have it reviewed on Amazon. How does this work?
ANSWER: The bad news about book reviews is that nearly every newspaper book-review supplement in the country has gone defunct in the past five years. Most of them never reviewed self-published work anyway. The New York Times, for example, has an ironclad policy. No reviews of self-published books, period — even if it’s best book since paper was invented.
The good news is, it’s easier than ever to find qualified, enthusiastic book reviewers who will post a review to Amazon or a popular literary social-networking site. And those reviews will last, unlike newspaper reviews, which are often used to line bird cages.
My article at Amazon.com discusses tactics for getting Amazon book reviews. However, there’s no longer a mechanism to contact people directly through Amazon because the “friends” feature no longer works. But with so many people belong to Facebook, etc., nowadays it’s pretty easy to contact someone by Googling their name. I discuss the changes regarding Amazon Top Reviewers here.
An increasingly popular way to distribute complimentary review copies of your book is by using two popular book social-networking sites, Goodreads and LibraryThing.
With LibraryThing, you’ll want to sign up as a “LibraryThing Author” and then participate in the “member giveaway.” (Self publishers aren’t eligible for the “early reviewer” program, nor Amazon’s Vine program. Prejudice dies hard.)
With Goodreads and LibraryThing reviewers, gently request that they also post a review at Amazon. Of course, there’s no obligation. Some reviewers are happy to do so, but perhaps two out of three will not. You can run into the occasional Amazon-hater who won’t go along, and there’s a certain percentage of people who don’t follow up generally. So you might have to give away 10 or 12 books to get 3 or 4 reviews posted to Amazon. But it’s well worth the time and expense. Most book buyers pay close attention to online book reviews.
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One other thing you can consider is offering free review copies to those willing to post an honest review on Amazon. If you’re doing things right, you have an active blog or other social media profile where you can reach potential readers. And if you’ve self published digitally, you have easy access via Smashwords to offer coupons to potential reviewers to download the format of their choice. I’m going this myself with my latest release and running a contest on my blog: http://kaitnolan.com/2010/05/18/sweetening-the-pot/ I’ve had pretty good success with this method.