We all dream of seeing a five-start review of our book gracing the front page of the New York Times book section, but for most authors–especially unestablished and self-published ones–the feat is extraordinarily difficult to accomplish. Fortunately, Amazon reader reviews are even more important for creating credibility and boosting your Amazon book rating, and should be treated as an equally huge opportunity. A New York Times review is great, but when potential customers are on Amazon ready to hit the Add to Cart button, the customer reviews are the ones that will really matter. Getting a high rating on Amazon depends first and foremost on the quality of your book, but we’ve come up with a number of tips to help increase the number of reviews you receive and their overall quality.
That being said, you should never try to cheat the system by soliciting 5-star reviews or attempting to eliminate negative reviews–not only does this look questionable to your audience, manipulation of reviews is not allowed by Amazon and will catch up with you in the end. If you happen to attract any reviews that appear to be malicious or are otherwise inappropriate, you can appeal to Amazon to have them removed, but when it comes to negative feedback that stems from differences in preference and opinion, our advice is: Don’t sweat it too much. Although it never feels great to get negative reviews, they can offer useful insight if they’re coming from a well-considered position. And they do serve a purpose: reviews exist to help readers decide whether or not your book is right for them, so if it isn’t, it’s better for them not to buy it. You don’t want to attract readers who are bound to be disappointed because they had misguided expectations from reviews.
So what kind of reviews do you want? There are two characteristics to seek out here: quality and quantity. In the early days after your book is published, quantity is most important. Books with at least ten reviews are ranked more highly by Amazon’s algorithms and so will be shown to more browsing book buyers than those with fewer.
Quality is also important, though, especially when you’re just starting out, as people often take the time to carefully read the first few reviews. You’ll want a number of thoughtful, well-written, unbiased reviews that will provide real value to your audience. You can and should appeal to your platform to submit these, including your personal contacts. But don’t mistake glowing positivity for quality — just as book-buyers will ignore obscenely hateful reviews, they will also ignore overly-positive reviews that seem as if they were written by the author (or the author’s mother), so be sure to direct your contacts to review your book honestly, fairly and in their own voice. Once you’ve hit at least a dozen reviews, very few browsing shoppers are going to take the time to read them all, so at that point, the eloquence of your reviews will matter less than the star rating attached to them.
There are a number of ways you can increase the quantity and quality of reviews you get, especially at the beginning of your book’s life, which is when they matter most. We’ll go over them here.
Start with your network
The first step to amassing a handful of good reviews is to reach out to your network, friends and family included, to ask whether they would be able to do you the favour of giving your book a review on Amazon. If they agree, send them a copy, whether an ebook or a print edition, and ask them to read it and prepare a review to have it ready for the book’s release date. It’s a good idea to follow up with periodic (and polite) reminders of the date when the review needs to be shared. (Amazon doesn’t allow posting of reviews in advance of publication.) On release date, they’ll be able to visit your book’s Amazon page to post the review (in the interest of full disclosure, they ought to mention that they got the book for free). This approach should net your book a number of high-quality reviews on day one, which will help immensely with its visibility and ranking. Of course, the number of reviews you’re able to collect in this way will depend on the size of your network, but by pursuing this in an organized way, it’s not unreasonable to aim for at least 20. There’s an astounding number of self-published books and ebooks on Amazon with no reviews at all. With 15 or 20, you’ll be ahead of the pack right out of the gate.
Next, ask your audience
Once your book is released and you have your primary influx of reviews, you can start asking your audience to share a review as well. Explain that you want their reviews to help you understand which parts of the book they liked, or simply let them know how helpful their review is in allowing you to keep doing the work that they clearly care about. There are many ways in which your audience can contribute immensely to your storehouse of reviews if you give them a reason to and make it easy for them. If a reader emails you to say how much they loved your book, thank them and ask for a review.
The power of top reviewers
Amazon algorithms don’t draw solely on the total number of reviews. As we mentioned earlier, the quality of the review is very important, which is why a lot of weight is given to official top reviewers. Top reviewers are people who consistently provide reviews–often thousands of them–that are consistently voted as “helpful” by Amazon’s userbase. You can ask top reviewers to give you a review by sending them an email or a copy of your book, though you’ll want to do some research first. Look for top reviewers who seem most likely to be a good fit for your subject matter, and whose review style is positive and smart. To find them, you can go through Amazon’s list of top reviewers (seen in the further reading section at the end of this ebook, or you can go to the Amazon pages of popular books in the same category as yours and check out the top reviewers who posted there.
Dealing with unjust reviews
The occasional negative review isn’t a bad thing. However, if you start receiving a large number of unjustly negative reviews, it can seriously affect your book’s Amazon ranking. There are different reasons why this might happen. Maybe your book got into the hands of nuisance reviewers (the Internet is full of trolls, and Amazon is no exception), or perhaps a special interest group is trying to attack you because they disagree with your message–if you wrote a book on why vanilla is the best ice-cream flavour, there might be a group of radical chocolatiers who want to suppress your book. Whatever the reason behind them, if you truly believe your reviews are unjust, there are ways to counteract them. First, check Amazon’s review guidelines. If you find the negative reviews are against Amazon’s policy, then you can contact Amazon support to have to have them removed. If they fall within the rules, you won’t be able to remove them, but you can “rally your troops”. Send out a request for positive reviews from your audience. If you explain what’s happening, you’ll surely find a few people who will be more than willing to help drown out the negative reviews.
Reviews aren’t just for bestselling authors anymore. Now, the easily-attainable Amazon reviews offer huge potential for increasing your credibility, Amazon rating, and book sales, so reach out to your fans, friends, and family to tap into this largely underused tool. Because, as they say, a book is worth a thousand reviews–so go get yours!
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