How to get Amazon reviews as a first-time author

Congratulations on writing and publishing your first book. What a feat! Some might say that the hard part is over, and to some extent it is. However, what use is a book if no one reads it? All your hard work of putting your imagination into words or penning your experience into a great how-to guide will be for naught of no one reads and benefits from your book.

This is where book reviews come in, book reviews are your gateway to getting noticed and having people read your book. The trouble is that in order to get book reviews you need to get people to read your book and if high school is anything to go by, people don’t read just anything.

Not only that, but you need reviews on Amazon for your book to make a solid stand, the general minimum number of reviews is 20 in the first 2 months but 50 is the sweet spot, as this starts generating more reviews because of your book gaining more traction.

This is where we want to give you a quick guide into how to get Amazon reviews as a first-time author, the right way.

Pre-publishing reader or editorial reviews

You know those that you asked to read the draft of your book, those people that are either in the industry that you are writing for or are in the demographic that you are writing for that you approached and asked for honest feedback on how to make your book better before it was published? These people have read your book already, why not ask them to leave you an HONEST review on Amazon? Getting these reviews should be easy enough as the people were willing to help you by reading the drafts. Just as a side note, ask for the reviews on the drafts after most of the structural editing has been done.

Ask and you shall receive

Nothing works quite as well as asking, but there is a way to ask, a certain etiquette one might say. You can’t make it sound like you only want good reviews nor should you come across as desperate in asking for a review to sell more books. The best thing to do is just a simple line such as “I would love to hear what you think about my book” or “I would love to hear your honest opinion”. Always ask for honesty and remember all criticism can be constructive.

Use your network

Chances are if you have been wanting to write a book for a while you probably have a few friends, colleagues or family members who would like to read it, even if it is just to show support. Use that support, and get a review out of it.

Building a launch team of between 30 and 50, this team can be made up of the aforementioned friends, colleagues and family but the team can also have members from social media fan groups or sites where you researched your demographic. Then about a month before your book is released, you send a PDF copy of your book to those in your launch team. Make sure that you ask your launch team for an honest review as this is what will make your book a success or not.

Go for the top

Reach out to someone in Amazon’s list of top reviewers who is enthusiastic about the field that you also wrote about or is learned in the field. This should not be a “throw as much as possible to see what sticks” kind of tactic. You should be intentional when you reach out to these top reviewers.

There are more ways that we might explore in another article, but for now we want to highlight that Amazon has very strict policies and terms on how reviews are obtained, with some rather brutal consequences for going against these terms, such as the removal of your book as well as the banning of your account. The last thing you, as a new indie-author want is for a place such as Amazon to ban you from publishing with them.

Make sure you know the rules before you play.