How To Get Honest Amazon Reviews For Your Kindle Book

I have created a new and improved version of K Money Mastery which is called, Mastering Book Publishing!

Have you always dreamed of writing a book?  Now is the time to do so.

Self-publishing has become a popular trend today and there are countless success stories of first-time authors who have made a career for themselves.

How are they doing it? By publishing e-Books on Amazon.com.

Amazon has constructed an entire eBook publishing platform that allows any author to reach potentially more than a billion readers around the world. Learning how to tap into Amazon's marketing machine will ensure that you build a strong platform and come out on top.

Let's jump ahead – so you've written an amazing book and now you’re ready to tell the world about it, but before you do that, you need some reviews. Reviews are very important to your publishing success because they legitimize your work as an author.  It's important to remember that all reviews are good; they are opportunities to learn and gain feedback in order to improve your book.

Getting real honest reviews is tough…or is it?

In this video, I will share with you some of the best long-term, sustainable strategies that people can implement in order to get honest reviews on Amazon that are compliant with their guidelines.

Watch the video below:

(Click here to watch on YouTube)

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Do you want my proven step-by-step system for publishing books on Amazon? CLICK HERE to purchase my new and improved Mastering Book Publishing course!

Video transcript

Hi, everyone. This is Stefan from projectlifemastery.com, and in this video, I'm going to show you guys how to get honest Amazon reviews for your Kindle books. I recently did a video blog sharing the best way to get Amazon reviews. If you haven't already watched that, I recommend it.

Go back; I'll have a link in the description or maybe somewhere on this video as an annotation. Go to that video because I share really how Amazon thinks and the best way, the most long-term and sustainable way to get reviews for your Kindle books or really any product on Amazon.

To summarize that, I do recommend watching it because it's a really good and powerful video. To summarize that, you have to understand what Amazon wants. They want you as a publisher and an author to basically publish your book on their platform, and then go out there and market the hell out of it. Go to social media, blogs, YouTube.

Use all the different channels and opportunities that are available online and market your product, market your book on Amazon or Kindle book. Then basically have customers organically leave reviews. They want to make sure reviews are legitimate, they're honest, they're not manipulating the system in any way.

If you are, if you're violating Amazon's review guidelines, they're likely to get deleted or removed. If you're massively manipulating the system then you could potentially get in trouble with Amazon, which is just bad news and you want to avoid.

I focus on the long term, the sustainable strategies, to get reviews on Amazon. However, I will share with you guys, in this video, a really powerful strategy. Something that you can do if you're just launching a brand new book on Kindle. This is something that I teach, inside of my Mastering Book Publishing course, which is a really awesome online training program on how to publish and sell Kindle books on Amazon.

Create a launch list

One of the best strategies that I can recommend for people to get honest reviews that are compliant with Amazon's guidelines, they're not going to get deleted or removed, is basically creating what I call a launch list. For every book that you sell on Kindle, you want to make sure that you have a launch strategy for that book.

Oftentimes, if you're brand new, you just want to get your book out there. You don't want to have as much friction to start selling. You want to start selling right away.

As you gain more experience as a publisher and as an author, you want to be more strategic with every book that you're going to publish and launch. You don't just want to put a book out there. Oftentimes you want to hype it up. You want to build it up, just like if you go and see a movie or something like that. They recently had the Batman versus Superman.

They hyped that thing up, that movie, for several months beforehand. What that does, is when you hype things up and you prepare for that, then it creates all this buzz. It creates this excitement and then when it's finally available, you have people who are raving fans that are rabid fans. People that just can't wait to get there on it and watch the movie.

That's how these big studios and movies and everything are able to do millions and millions of dollars.

Similar to Apple. When Apple launches a product they don't just put out a product like a new iPhone and say go buy it. They announce it. They build up a lot of hype for it. Sure enough, when it does become available, people are waiting outside the Apple store and everything, twenty-four hours in advance or whatever, just to be able to go and buy the new iPhone or whatever.

That's the power of a successful launch. That's how you want to think. You want to develop a strategy for every book that you're going to launch. Getting reviews, honest reviews, is part of that strategy. One strategy that I have is building a launch list. For every book that you're going to publish what you want to do is you can either put it either available on a pre-sale, which is a new feature that KDP has in Kindle Direct Publishing.

You can have a book as a pre-sale option where basically the book is available to purchase. People can leave reviews on your Amazon listing, but they can't yet download and receive the book. You decide when the book becomes available, in which case then they're going to receive the book and be able to download it and read it. The pre-sale option is a great feature but it's not required. You can utilize the strategy even without doing that.

Let's say that you have a book, it's on weight loss. It's a weight loss book. In order to get reviews and build up the hype and the buzz, and be able to give your book that boosts right out of the gate when you launch it; what I recommend for people to do is build a launch list. Basically, if you have a weight loss book, you want to find all the people out there.

Reach out to people

Find different audiences and demographics of people that are going to be interested in your book on weight loss. For example, you can go on different message boards and forums. You can go to different Facebook groups. You can go on LinkedIn.

You can go on Twitter. Even on Twitter, you can do a search for weight loss and you can see all the people that are tweeting about weight loss. You can reach out to these people. You can reach out to these people on message boards, on Facebook, et cetera, on Reddit.

You can reach out to these people and say, “Hey, I notice you're interested in weight loss. I've got this great book that can help you. It's a great book on weight loss. It has a lot of different tips and strategies on how to lose weight. I think you'll really enjoy it. I'd love to send you this book for free.” Or, “This book is going to be free on a free promotion from this time to this time.”

Or, “The book's going to be heavily discounted, only ninety-nine cents on this day. I'd love for you to check it out and receive value from this. In exchange, would you mind sharing your thoughts, leaving an honest review on Amazon? If it's great, share that it's great. If it's bad, then share potential feedback you might have for me.”

By doing that, by reaching out to a lot of people, what I often do is I reach out to a mass number of people that are targeted, that are interested in the subject of my book, the niche. You want to make sure people are targeted. Reach out to all those people. Get people that will say yes, they'll agree to it or whatever. In which case you can either send them the PDF of the book, the actual book file directly to their email.

Your book as gift

You could gift them the book as well, on Amazon. Amazon has a gifting feature. You can even send people a gift card to buy your book. There are different ways of delivering your book to people. You basically … They'll agree to it and then you add them to what is basically an Excel spreadsheet.

I keep track of everyone in Excel spreadsheet. This is my launch list. These are all the people that have agreed. Their name, their email. They've agreed to check on my book and leave a review. I've made it clear to them that the book is going to be available in these days and times.

I ask them if they're able to … I give them enough notice, but I ask them to be able to leave a review on this day, or during this week, or during this two week period because that's my launch period. I want to get all those reviews for the book or the product.

Just by doing that what happens is, you reach out to a lot of people. You build this list. Over time, you keep doing this, you're going to have a list of over a hundred people that you can go to, to get a hundred reviews for your book. Every time you're going launch a new product, a new book on Amazon, you can basically go to your launch list that you've built up maybe over several months or even several years.

You go to your launch list and you say, “Hey, I've got a new book available now. Has a new book on weight loss.” Or this book's on dieting or this book's exercise. “I'd love for you to check it out. I'll send you access to it and leave an honest review.”

You can already see how powerful this is. The ultimate way of doing this is by building an email list, which is basically a list of your customers. That will happen over time. That is something you're going to want to focus on if you're going to be publishing on selling Kindle books. You want to use it as an opportunity to build an email list of your customers because then you can build a relationship with them.

They've already read your books. They've already received value from you in some way. You want to build that email list eventually. Having this launch list and basically just putting in the time and finding potential reviewers of your book, people that would be interested in it and building that up. That's very powerful.

Disclaimers from people you know

You do have to be aware of Amazon's guidelines. For example, some of their guidelines are like, they don't want people that know the author or the publisher to leave a review. That's kind of a gray area. People still do that. Amazon will delete those reviews. They have somehow, some way of knowing that your mom left a review for your book.

However, I do recommend that if you are going to reach out to people, whether it's your friends on social media or people you might know or whatever, make sure that they're leaving a disclaimer in their review. Basically by having a disclaimer in the review and saying I've received this product for free in exchange for leaving a review, often times that will be enough for Amazon.

They'll be okay with it. If they received the product for free, you sent them a PDF or whatever it is, of the book, making sure that they disclose that. The relationship that they might have with you. Even if it's like … Again I don't want to share anything that might be against Amazon's guidelines.

Let's say that your sister left a review on your book. She's like, screw Amazon's guidelines, I want to leave a review on your book. By her saying in the review that I'm the sister of this author or this publisher, again that's something Amazon likes to see. That's just basically making the review more honest for the potential customer as well.

That, I believe, is one of the best ways, the best strategies for getting reviews for your book or your product. It does take time, I understand that. I wish I could just give you guys a shortcut, like a quick fix or whatever. Oftentimes people are looking for that.

Success requires work

Oftentimes the more sustainable, long-term methods that are going to lead to the most success, they require work.

They require putting in the time and working hard. I wish I could just give you guys a lazy way of getting reviews. Again, like I said, if you focus on those short term strategies, you can get a lot of reviews but then they're going to disappear.

I've seen that time and time again with publishers. They buy reviews. They're doing things that are clearly against Amazon's guidelines. Maybe they get a bunch of reviews for their book but then within a few weeks or a few months all those reviews disappear. If your book was selling and it was ranked high on Amazon, now all of a sudden it has a sudden drop and then your kind of restarting all over again to try to build that book back up.

By building this launch list … Again you want to find where people are hanging out that are interested in your book, that want to receive your book. There are so many different places online.

Go for the top reviewers on Amazon

Even just going after the top reviewers on Amazon because Amazon rewards people for leaving reviews on Amazon. They actually have a whole ranking list of the top reviewers on Amazon. A lot of them, they want to receive products or books for free to leave reviews because that's all they do all day. They'll have their contact information on their Amazon profile.

That's another way too, that you can reach out to people and find people that can potentially leave reviews for your books. By putting the time, guys, hustling and grinding and reaching out to people and building that launch list, that's a powerful asset you have now for every book that you launch.

Even if at the beginning you only start out with ten people or fifteen people, that's ten or fifteen reviews that you can get on your book either before it's available for sale on Amazon or right out of the gate. Right when you launch that book, you can get those ten or fifteen reviews just like that. Because you have those reliable people that have already agreed to receive your book and leave reviews for you.

Again, I do want to encourage, because the title of this video is, To go after Honest Reviews, you don't want fake reviews. You don't want people to lie. You want people to honestly share their thoughts on your book. If your book is good and it warrants five stars, they'll leave a five-star review. If it's not good, if it's one star or two-star book, then leave that as a review or at least directly communicate with me and provide feedback that I can use to make it better.

All reviews are good

Every review is an opportunity for you to learn and have feedback to improve your book to make it better and better. Like you guys are watching this video right now, if you like it, hit the like button. If you don't like it, click the dislike button. You know, I want you to share honestly how you feel. If you're receiving value, great. If not, then let me know that, because that's valuable feedback that I can utilize to make my videos, my YouTube channel better and better.

My whole focus in business, in marketing, is always becoming better, always improving and trying to add as much value as possible. That's one of the best ways, I feel, to get honest reviews for your Kindle book. Of course, if you guys want to learn more about how to market your book and sell your book on Amazon and on Kindle, I've got a great online training program called, Mastering Book Publishing.

It's helped hundreds and hundreds of people make money online from Kindle Publishing. Even people that have gone on to make a six figure income from online publishing, which is pretty remarkable to me. If you guys want to learn more about my progra, check out the link below. It's reasonably priced.

It's a really great training program. It will help you better market and sell your products better on Amazon. That's it for this video guys. Thanks for watching. Be sure to leave a comment below. I'll talk to you in the next video.

Do you want my proven step-by-step system for publishing books on Amazon? CLICK HERE to purchase my new and improved Mastering Book Publishing course!