If you're an author or Kindle publisher, then you know the importance of having high quality reviews.
Simply put, without reviews, nobody will buy your book. It can be a challenge at timse for authors or publishers, as you might have a really great book, but if you can't get sales for it then nobody will review it either.
That's why it's extremely important that when you first launch a book on Kindle to start accumulating reviews for it quickly so that you can get some momentum selling it. Once your book is selling, then the reviews can come much more easily and consistently.
I want to quickly share some easy methods that I've used to help you get Amazon reviews for your Kindle book.
Find Where Your Customers Hangout And Give Away Your Book To Them
If you don't already have a list of subscribers or followers that you can send your Kindle book to and get reviews from, then you'll want to start finding them.
One of the easiest ways to get reviews for your book is to find out where your customers are hanging out and then offer to give your book away to them for free.
For example, let's say you have a book on Binge Eating Disorder.
All you'd have to do from there is just do a search on Facebook for “Binge Eating” and you'll find a ton of Facebook groups that you can join and interact with other members. THESE people are your demographic, your potential customers.
If you have a great book that is targeted to help them solve their goal of overcoming binge eating disorder and offer it to them for free, then why wouldn't they receive it? They'd be crazy not to!
The key here is to offer your book away to these people for free and then follow-up with them afterwards to request an honest review of the book and have them post it on Amazon.
You can either gift your book to them on Amazon (there's a send as a gift option on Amazon.com) or you could send them a gift card to purchase your book. The reason why you want them to purchase the book is so that it shows up as a Verified Review on Amazon, which is the most valuable type of review you can get for your book.
In the same way, you could also find the message boards and forums online and offer your book for free there also. To find forums in Google on a particular subject, just type in “forum: (keyword)”.
For example: forum: binge eating
This will bring up a list of forums and messages boards around that topic.
I've done this with some of my Kindle books and have been able to accumulate over 50 Amazon reviews on them within a month. It's crazy how much of a difference this can make, especially if you find a large group of people that are willing to receive your book.
Not only that, when I've had all of these other people buy my book at $0.99 (with an Amazon Gift Card I sent them), the Amazon Bestseller Rank of my books shot through the roof and ranked my book higher for all of its keywords also. This has led to A LOT of sales just by using these simple strategy for getting Amazon reviews.
Ask For Amazon Book Reviews In Your Kindle Book
Another easy strategy for getting Amazon book reviews is just by asking for them in your Kindle book.
In all of my Kindle books, I have a section at the end of my book that asks the customer for a review. It typically looks like this:
If you enjoyed this book or received value from it in any way, then I’d like to ask you for a favor: would you be kind enough to leave a review for this book on Amazon? It’d be greatly appreciated!
This little trick has helped all of my Kindle books get more reviews.
As you can see, I like to use a cute image to help soften the reader up a little and just show “thanks” for reading my book and for their support.
I also have a link in my Kindle book that goes directly to the review page on Amazon.com for my book, which makes it extremely easy for the person to review the book. This is key, as I've noticed this increase the numbers of reviews I get substantially.
Without having this link, the customer would have to go to Amazon.com, find the book page themselves and then post the review. Too many steps for the customer, which prevents them from doing it. You want to make reviewing your book as easy as possible for the customer.
You can also include a little blurb or link for the customer to review the book mid-way through the book as well, so that you grab Amazon reviews from your customers before they have a chance to finish the book. It could just say:
Enjoying this book so far? I'd love it for you to share your thoughts and post a quick review on Amazon!
The truth is, not everyone will read your entire book until the end, which is why it's vital to grab a review from them at the early stages of your book also.
Use The KDP Select Free Promotions To Get Tons Of Downloads And Reviews
If you have your Kindle book optimized to ASK for reviews (just like how I showed above), then using the KDP Select Free Promotion service that Kindle Direct Publishing provides is very useful for getting Amazon book reviews.
If you get a couple hundred or thousand downloads to your Kindle book within a 5-day free promotion, that could easily lead to a handful of verified reviews if you have it set up right.
Of course, the more downloads you get, the higher chance you have to get reviews. That's why you want to promote your Kindle book as much as you can during your 5-day free promotion.
Ask Your Friends And Family For Help
This is always a controversial thing to do, as I've had people tell me how this is wrong and violates Amazon's review submission guidelines.
While I agree that it's in the best interest of the customers to read reviews that aren't biased in any way, I don't think it hurts to get reviews from friends and family as long as you ensure that they're honest and even disclose in the review that they are your friend or family member.
Now, I understand not everyone will do this. I understand you're more likely to get favorable reviews from friends and family either way. I'm not looking to get into a debate about this whether it's “right or wrong”, but I'm just sharing this as another way for you to get Amazon reviews.
The truth is, almost EVERY author out there does this.
You know when you purchase a book from Tony Robbins or someone and then on the back of the book you see these “reviews” or “endorsements” from other bestselling authors? Well, those reviews and endorsements are from their FRIENDS. They basically just ask their friends to review their book for them and write something nice about them, which they will happily do.
I have a lot of friends that come to me for help in their businesses. They want me to provide them with a testimonial, a review for this or that, or to help them out in some way. I happily do it because I want to support them and their endeavours, and they will do the same for me.
I think getting reviews on Amazon is no different. If you have a book that you're proud of or is valuable and will help people, then do whatever it takes to get it out there to the world.
Send your book to your friends and family and ask them: Could you browse through my book and if you find it valuable, post an honest review of it on Amazon?
You can do the exact same thing if you have a list of followers on your blog, website, e-mail list, Facebook, Twitter, etc… Tim Ferriss recently did this with some of his latest books, which he was able to launch and get HUNDREDS of Amazon reviews for them literally overnight.
Submit Your Kindle Book To These Sites For Free Amazon Reviews
There's no guarantee of course that they all will do it, but after experimenting with these and sending off some of my books to them, I saw some good results from doing it that made it worthwhile on some of my books.
Please note that some of these sites are for Kindle books, while others will accept paperback or hardcopy books.
I've set up the links below to go directly to the submission form on each site. You just need to fill out the required instructions and submit your book to them.
Online Book Club
The Kindle Book Review
Top Book Reviewers
Kindle Obsessed
Book Ideas
Midwest Book Review
Reader's Favorite
Inkspand
Foreword Reviews
Alice Marvels
The Indie Bookshelf
Litarena
I Love YA Fiction
iPen Designs
Book Pleasures
Uncustomary Book Reviews
LitPick
Kindle Book Review
Rainbow Book Reviews
There's many more of these types of websites out there that you can find just by searching around on the internet. The key is, when it comes to getting Amazon reviews on your Kindle book, you want to try to get reviews from as many different sources as possible. This is just another additional resource for you to get reviews from.
Reviews, Reviews, Reviews!
As an author and Kindle publisher, you always have to be on the pursuit of getting Amazon reviews for your books.
The more reviews that your books accumulate, generally the more sales you'll get and the higher you can price your Kindle books at.
There's many other strategies for getting Amazon reviews out there that I use, some being easier and faster than others.
If you want to learn more about how to make money with Kindle publishing, then check out my popular Mastering Book Publishing program. I hope you enjoyed these strategies on how to get Amazon reviews for your Kindle book!
If there's any questions or comments, please leave them below!
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