Hello, Writer, and welcome back to my life. It's Writer Wednesday, the day where I give
you my tips and advice on the art and the business of writing, and tell you how
I do what I do as an indie author. Today's question comes from patron Ryan
Starbloak, who asks: how do you get more Amazon reviews? It can be very tough when
you're first starting out. You ask people, and a very small tiny percentage of them
actually do it. Some people will accept a book for review and post review on their
blog, not on Amazon. How do you deal with all this stuff? I have to say, I was
astounded that I had not previously made a video on this subject, because it is a
big question that a lot of new authors ask. I know that I've talked about it
before, but I must have done that on podcasts or something, 'cause this is the
first time I'm talking about it on video. So, Amazon reviews. Let's break them down
as a subject. First of all: how important are they? Super important,
turns out. Super, crazy, wow, very such importance. You want Amazon reviews. You
want a lot of them. You want as [many] as you can possibly get. There are a few
thresholds to Amazon reviews that really seem to matter. Once you get 50 reviews
on a book, that is when Amazon starts entering you into their algorithm as
somebody to promote. That is when they will start emailing people that your
book should be checked out. They will notify people, they'll start putting you
in also-boughts. 50 reviews seems to be, based on the best data that we have, the
magic number for that sort of promotion to start happening from Amazon. Three-
digit reviews—in other words, a hundred reviews or more—seem to be a very
magical number in terms of advertisements. When you're running ads,
whether you're running them on Amazon itself or on Facebook, a hundred reviews
seems to make a giant difference in the amount of people who will click on your
advertisement. It's like several percentage points higher of how many
people will click on your advertisement and that—like, that several percent
doesn't seem like that big of a deal. When you're talking about marketing, it's
a very big deal. And beyond that, the more reviews you have and the higher your
average, the better for you. My first book, 'Nightblade,' has more than 1,200 reviews or
something like that. It's very easy to market and
advertise that book with that many reviews. But how did I get that many
reviews? The very astute observer, looking at my book, 'Nightblade' on Amazon will
notice that the next book, 'Mystic,' has a couple of hundred reviews, but nowhere near
as many as the first one. Well, I did that with a marketing strategy that is no
longer really possible, or no longer obeys Amazon's Terms of Service. And this is
very unfortunate, because it's not really something that people can do anymore.
Back in the Wild West days of indie authordom, kind of a lot of people were
doing this. Now you can get flagged from Amazon if you do it. So what I used to do
was basically give people a free copy of 'Nightblade' if they joined my email list
and then I would offer them a free copy of 'Mystic' if they would then go and
review 'Nightblade' on Amazon. And then I paid for lots of Facebook ads that got
people to sign up for my email list, which put them through that
autoresponder that would ask them to do that. Now, some people say you can still
do this, but it is definitely against Amazon's new Terms of Service, so if you
do it, you run a risk of pissing off the only platform that will allow you to
build a career as an indie author. If you're just starting out, you might not
care, and you might give it a shot. But don't say that I didn't warn you, because
I cannot in good conscience just wholeheartedly recommend that people do
this, when—yeah, it could go badly for you. What you can do that is still in
Amazon's Terms of Service, right? You are allowed to give out review copies of
books. You're able to speak to book reviewers and give them a free copy of a
book in exchange for their review. And what we have is we have a list of a few
hundred people who are our review team. Now, the difference here is slight, but
it's very important to understand it. You cannot ask somebody to review Book A in
exchange for a free copy of Book B, okay? That is against the Terms of Service. But
you can give somebody a free copy of Book A in order for them to read and
review book A. And so our review team, we track whether they leave their reviews
on Amazon or not, and when we release a new book that goes out to the entire
review team. And then, once they have left their review, we mark them as a done, and
they are then eligible to receive the next book. They are
our review team. They receive free copies of every book in order to review those
copies as soon as they come out. So, that seems like a really easy solution, right?
Well, I'll just offer free copies to a bunch of people on my list in order to
get them to review it. Well, if you have tried this, you will see that it is not
that easy. Even people on that review team will not do it. We will add new
people to the review team decently often and they will just get the first free
book and never leave a review. So they never end up getting the second one or
anything else later in the series. The best way that i have found to do this, to
actually add people onto the review team who will then leave reviews, is to reach
out to people who are already engaged active members of your community. You can
do this on a bunch of automated email software, but if somebody actually
replies to your emails—doesn't just open, doesn't just click on the link, but
replies to your emails, that's an engaged person. They you they care about you more
than probably 95% of people in your list. And so you can have your software
automatically tag people who have replied to your emails. And then you can
send out an email just to those people saying, "Hey, I know that you buy and read
my books. Would you like to be on my review team?" These are probably the most
qualified people you can possibly get on your review team, and if you do it with a
sizable list that you've already built, they will probably have already read
your entire catalog, and they will be willing to go and just review them.
You don't have to wait for them to read each book, they just go and leave reviews
for it. So this can be a good way to get reviews. And, as always, you want to
prioritize reviews on the first book in your series, or if you have multiple
series, the first book in each series. Because reviews determine how easy it is
to get new people to read your books. But the reason that I have fewer reviews on
my second book than on my first book by, like, a lot, is because if somebody has
read Book 1, the number of reviews on Book 2 isn't what's going to sell them
on Book 2. It's how good Book 1 was. So in any review building strategy that you
put together, you have got to got to got to prioritize reviews on your first book,
not the entire—like, the entire series, yes that's good,
that's very helpful, but your first book, top priority always. Now, one other little
subject in Ryan Starbloak's question is people who—you know, book bloggers—who
will read your book and review it on their blog, but not also drop that review
on Amazon. These are two different things. Book blog reviews are not serving the
same purpose as Amazon reviews. To be a hundred percent honest, you are playing a
numbers game with Amazon reviews, and you don't care what's in those reviews.
Because the number of reviews, and your average rating on your Amazon reviews, is
fifteen times more important than the content of your reviews. Something like
four percent of Amazon shoppers will ever actually read the reviews on a book.
They will only look at how many reviews it has and what's the average rating. If a
book blogger has reviewed your book on their blog, that is great, and it's also
not that great. I am so, so appreciative when a book blogger does that. Like, it's
awesome, and they're probably gonna sell some copies to their audience, if they
have one, but they are just never gonna be quite as effective as an aggregated
number of reviews on Amazon. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing. Book bloggers are
amazing people, they definitely help keep reading alive. I wish that they partnered
with indies more, but based on the percentage of indie books that are, you
know, like, not edited and all that sort of stuff, I understand why they don't. So
I will always if any book blogger or BookTuber, you know, YouTuber who reviews
books, if any of them ever reach out wanting a free copy of my book,
absolutely, I'll send it right away. If they sell two copies of that book on
their review, then that that's a profitable activity for me, but I don't
go around chasing down book blogs and book tubers and seeing if they will
review my books, because it's just not the right time versus—time
investment versus what you get back. So in summary, book bloggers and BookTubers
are not the same thing as Amazon reviews, and you should recognize that their
posts are valuable in their own way, but you should not try and pressure those
people to lead Amazon reviews as well. You should try to put together a review
team of people to review your books and prioritize them reviewing the first book.
And you should always try to get as many
reviews as possible on the first book in each series so that your series is as
easy to start for a new person as possible. Thank you so much to Ryan for
the question. It was a good one. Hope you and others found the answer helpful.
Reminder to everybody else watching that Ryan and my other $5 patrons on Patreon
get all of these videos two weeks in advance, and are also the only people who
are allowed to request the topics for me to cover in the video, so if that sounds
interesting, check out my Patreon right over there. You can also see the entire
Writer Wednesday video series right up there. Thank you so much for watching, and
I will see you next Wednesday. Byyye!
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