I hope you learned from the week-long book promotion blog-shop (that’s my play on the term workshop). I know it was meaningful to at least one woman as she came to my website and purchased all 3 of my latest books—Publish Your Book, Promote Your Book and Talk Up Your Book.
By the way, there is a new 5-star review at Amazon for Talk Up Your Book. This makes 8 of them.
If you have a book and you’ve accumulated reviews, you know how interesting it is to find out how others view it—their perspective on your book. Very often, you learn new ways to promote your book based on how others describe it. C. Hope Clark offers a fascinating sketch of Talk Up Your Book in her new review and shares some interesting analogies to describe the intent and value of it.
Honest reviews from your colleagues and your readers can be most valuable in promoting your book. First, their followers trust their opinion and this will surely spark sales. But also, reviewers can provide you with some interesting new ways to describe and present your book that you may not have thought of.
We talked about getting book reviews during the weeklong blog-shop. But I don’t think authors use the book-review option to the fullest extent that they could. It appears to me that most authors avoid going to the trouble to get reviews. Sure it can be time-consuming and sometimes rather demeaning. If you want a review from a particular professional or author in your genre, for example, you sometimes have to keep asking for it. People put things off and reading a book. Writing a review is one of those things that seems to land on the bottom of our to-do list.
So not only does that leave the author with the responsibility of locating and approaching appropriate reviewers, but he/she is stuck with the job of following up on those they have found the courage to contact.
You may notice that some books have dozens of reviews at amazon.com. That’s mostly because the author or publisher or publicist has asked for the reviews and have, in some cases, badgered the potential reviewer to follow through.
For the author or other professional, writing a book reviews is generally not a priority. Even those who have book review sites and spend all their time doing book reviews may be sluggish when it comes to reviewing your book. That’s generally because they are inundated with books. Since they are reading and reviewing for pleasure, they pick and choose the books they want to read.
If you are an author or hope to be soon, I write for you. See my array of books at my Matilija Press website or at Amazon.com. If you have recently finished your book manuscript or you are showing one around and are not having much luck landing a publisher, send it to me for a free editorial evaluation. I may be able to help. Yes, I am also a book editor. Contact me here: PLFry620@yahoo.com