How to Get Reviews & Endorsements: Author Income Strategies Series

By Linda Stirling

Getting book reviews and endorsements no longer needs to feel like an insurmountable challenge. Inside How to Get Book Reviews and Endorsements, you'll learn:

• How to get endorsements
• How to get trade reviews
• How to get editorial reviews
• How to get more reader reviews
• The timing needed for endorsements and each kind of review
• How to approach endorsers and reviewers, including sample letters

Additionally, you're provided with contact information for key trade review sites and information so you can reach Amazon's top reviewers. There are also links to thirty book review sites. Nothing is left to figure out on your own, as the methods of delivering content to reviewers are also discussed.

 

Resources include these free resources:

• a question list for your beta readers (perfect to filter out who will leave you a review)
• a "how to review" handout you can provide to your teams
• a set of review acquisition templates that make all of this easier

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Publishing Circle
• Release date: Aug 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781955018210

Book preview

Chapter 2

Why You Need Book Reviews & Endorsements

THIS IS A DULL, needy book.

The above quote is from a 2019 review by Parul Sehgal in The New York Times. The unlucky target of this barb was You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian.

Sehgal is a renowned book critic. Her book reviews appear in The New York Times on a regular basis. Thousands of people who subscribe to The New York Times read them. What do you think happens when she bashes a book?

Book reviews have the potential to make or break a book. For an upcoming writer such as Roupenian, negative book reviews are a big liability.

But you may think that book reviews don’t hold as much weight as I am making them out to have. After all, we know of many classics that were panned upon their release only to become, well, classics.

For instance, writing about James Joyce’s Ulysses, a Times reviewer said, the average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it . . . save bewilderment and a sense of disgust.

On Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, another Times reviewer said, It is a book one can get very well along without reading.

As you probably know, both Ulysses and Sister Carrie are still in print and are taught in classrooms decades after their publication. So why should we care about what book reviewers say? Don’t we trust readers to recognize the beauty of our craft by themselves?

While your questions are certainly valid, the sad reality is that human beings are impressionable creatures who are deeply influenced by what others are saying and doing. In an ideal world, the only toil a writer would have to suffer is crafting a book. If it is any good, millions of readers would naturally find it, buy it, and the writer would live their life in contentment.

But that is not the kind of reality we live in. In the world today, writers need book reviews—lots of reviews. If you don’t believe me, take a minute to think about the last few books you read. How did you come across them? Did you walk into a library and pick a book at random? Did you go to your favorite bookstore and pick a title blindly from the shelves? The more you think about it, the more you will discover that many of the books you have read were either recommended by someone you knew, were reviewed favorably by a magazine or book reviewer you liked, or were strongly endorsed by