You’ve written, printed, and published your book. Then what? If nobody knows it’s there, you’ll get zero sales.  This is where publicity comes in.  In this post, I’ll talk about getting your book reviewed. The good news is you can ignore most of the options out there.

Book sales come from advertising, word of mouth, searches, and reviews. I began to think about getting my novel reviewed about six months before the release date

In the old days, you’d send your book out to the reviews editor of newspapers and magazines. My publicity company will try to place such reviews. While these are important, getting your book accepted is very hard. But the internet has transformed book reviews. Readers can leave reviews on the internet, And now there are BOOK BLOGGERS. Many of them have huge followings and can be very influential in driving sales.

This is how I created a list of almost 800 potential reviewers.

If you start searching online for how and where to secure reviews, you get inundated by information, much of it bad. And if you join discussion groups on the subject, as I did on Goodreads, you’ll find your in-box filling up with offers to give you reviews in return for money.

Never pay for a review

Reviews have two different purposes

You want your reviews to do two different things:

• Spread the word to lots of potential readers. For this, you want to target reviewers with a big following
• Increase the ranking of your book on sites like Amazon and BookBub (I’ll cover BookBub in a later post on advertising). For this, the readers only need to review and like your book.

Start early

I started six months before publication. Here’s what I did. My navigation through the blooming buzzing confusion may help you. These are the key principles of my approach:

• Identify the key sites
• Locate bloggers who’re likely to be influential and sympathetic to your book
• Create lists of reviewers to contact

Three key sites

There are a host of sites, blogs and apps. To make it manageable, I developed focus. The key general sites I aimed to understand are Netgalley, Goodreads, and Amazon.

Netgalley One respected and key source of book bloggers is Netgalley. It acts as a portal for putting your advance review copy before reviewers. This site hosts over 380,000 reviewers, librarians and booksellers, 45,000 of them in the UK. Members produce 60,000 reviews a month.  It describes itself as helping “readers of influence discover and recommend new books to their audiences.” One top reviewer I checked had just under 4,000 followers. The majority of NetGalley readers are interested in Teens and YA, General Fiction, Mystery and Thrillers, and Sci-Fi and Fantasy, and there is least interest in Middle Grade, Humour, Horror, Sports, and Literary Fiction The site is free for reviewers, but they charge authors and publishers to list there (around $399-599). But, luckily, I already had access through my publisher’s promotion program.

The key sites on which you really want reviews to appear are Goodreads and Amazon. Most of the influential bloggers post reviews on those sites.

Goodreads This is a book listing and review site, perhaps the most important on which to secure reviews. Is now owned by Amazon, but operates independently of the parent company. It is the largest and best-known book review site. In 2018 it had 80 million users and listed 2.3 billion books and boasted 80 million reviews.

Amazon In the US in 2018, the internet giant controlled almost 50% of physical book sales and 83% of e-book sales.  Reviews, as well as adverts, on Amazon are therefore supremely important to boost these sales. Think of it not just as a sales platform, but as a search engine for books.

Locate bloggers

Apart from the reviewers on NetGalley, I needed to find some key bloggers and reviewers, particularly those who post on Goodreads and Amazon. There are millions, as any internet search will prove. But they don’t all read in my genre, and they’re not all in my country (where I would expect the majority of my sales to be concentrated). Some bloggers will only accept traditionally published books.

So, I began to narrow down my search. On Goodreads and Amazon, I identified the relevant top reviewers in the UK. You can do this by looking at the number of reviews and what they review. There is no direct way of putting your book in front of these people. But, on Goodreads, there are forums so you can hang out where they do, and follow and friend them. The list of relevant Amazon top reviewers turned out to be surprisingly small—only three of the top 100 matched my criteria and one of these was also on Goodreads.

You can identify top reviewers on Goodreads through listing them https://www.goodreads.com/user/best_reviewers. Similarly, the Amazon rankings are on https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/top-reviewers. Many of the key reviewers, unsurprisingly, are also top Netgalley members.

Beyond the key sites, there are many book bloggers out there. You may already know some of them. If you don’t, or to add to your contacts here are a couple of useful listings of book bloggers that I used.

• https://the-bibliofile.com/list
• https://theempoweredauthor.com/book-bloggers/category/Literary+Fiction
• https://bookrevieweryellowpages.com/book-bloggers

Many bloggers will be completely uninterested in your genre and style. So expect to pass over most of them. I noted down perhaps 6% of entries, even though I’d searched by my genre.

Every now and again, one of the bloggers will also list other book bloggers they follow. If you like their approach, you’ll probably like a fair number of those they follow. I found one such blogger who listed 13 others. Of these, almost a quarter were suitable for me.

You can get a useful sense of how influential a blogger is by looking at the number of their followers. Where they don’t publish this number, you can still get a sense of traffic on their site by looking at their Alexa rank. You just type the site’s URL into the box and click.

Build lists

My initial list comprised almost 800 potential reviewers

It included the obvious people:

• Suitable friends and friends of friends (12)
• Authors I know (including members of my physical and online writing groups) (70)
• Followers of my blog (665). Of course, not all of these are potential reviewers.

Then I began to create lists of the less obvious ones

• Book bloggers I’d had contact with before, particularly for the blog tour for a collection of stories in which I’d appeared. (9)
• Appropriate book bloggers I didn’t know (24)
• Goodreads top reviewers (13)
• Amazon top reviewers (3)

Timing

Choosing the right time is crucial. I wanted as many reviews as possible to coincide with the launch of my book in November. So the right time to approach potential reviewers was around six weeks before, in September.

Activating the lists

Any marketer will tell you, the key thing is relationship. Those people I already had a relationship with were simple—I just asked them for a favour. The unknown people needed some more thought. With some, I tried to build a relationship beforehand by commenting on their reviews. With others I researched in detail the genres they preferred, looking in particular for books they’d enjoyed that I had too.

The principles of contacting a reviewer are really common sense but I’ll reiterate them here:

• Research. Make sure you understand the kind of books they’re interested in, and that yours fits. Check that they are open to receiving review copies (many close periodically with long backlogs). Read their review policy and you follow it.
• Personalise. Never do a mass mailing. Tailor each contact to the particular reviewer. Address them by their real name, not the name of their site. Identify something you have in common, particularly something in their blog you can comment favourably on.
• Be polite. They don’t have to read your book. You’re asking them for a favour.
• Proof read. Check your e-mail carefully for spelling or grammar mistakes. An illiterate message does little to sell an author’s competence.

The final list

Not all of the potential reviewers are equally suitable. I pared my list down to the top 50. In a couple of weeks, I’ll press “go”.

Oscar Wilde said that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Setting a price is an art, not a science. But it’s not all guesswork. As a trip round any shop will confirm, pricing at one penny under a round number is a common ploy to lure the consumer. So my price was going to end in 99 pence.

Set a level too low, and readers will perceive it as having no value, set it too high and nobody will buy. Amazon (the premium book retail site) offers 70% return to the author on prices between £2.99 and £9.99, providing a range within which the sweet spot should lie.

The average cost of a fiction title in 2018 was £3.23, but the important thing is to pick a level in relate to comparable titles, which takes a little research. Looking at some comparable authors, I located a price point at around £7.99 to £8.99.

You also need to set a price that will cover your production costs. The print on demand cost for a single copy of my book is around £5, but costs come down as the number increases. A print run of 500 copies brought my unit cost down to under £2.

Finally, you need to factor-in discounts for wholesalers and retailers. Assuming 45% discount on a paperback and 30% on e-books, I calculated that a price of £7.99 for the paperback and £3.99 for the e-book would give me a return of £1.20 and £2.79 per copy respectively.