Book reviews—the priceless currency authors dream about—are so important for so many reasons. The most basic: social proof. They show potential readers that others have read and enjoyed your book. They can improve your placement on sites like Amazon (putting your work in front of more readers) and make you eligible for promotion sites like BookBub which require a minimum number of reviews before promoting your book.

“How To” articles recommend doing everything from giving out ARC’s in exchange for reviews to contacting Top Amazon Reviewers. Neither of those things guarantees a positive review if they follow through and review at all.

The one way to guarantee a positive review?

Ask the people who are already enjoying your book.

I don’t mean asking your mom or sending out a single tweet to the masses. Instead, engage with readers who are excited about your book and are sharing it with their friends. Whether they’re tweeting to their followers, sharing a picture of your gorgeous cover, or including you on a list of top books from the last year—these are prime reviewers!

It can be awkward, but if you’re not going to promote yourself, who will?

Operation Ask For Amazon Book Reviews

Working with Heather Demetrios, we put this strategy to the test. In June of 2017, Heather published Bad Romance, a beautiful and heart-wrenching book about a young girl in an emotionally abusive relationship. It’s a powerful story, and judging by her Twitter feed and Goodreads reviews, readers love it. In Mid-November 2017, she had over 1,400 ratings and 427 reviews on Goodreads.

But for some reason, those reviews weren’t making it over to Amazon, the site where people actually buy their books. At that same time, Bad Romance had 32 reviews on Amazon.

The discrepancy is mind-boggling—32 to the 427 on Goodreads!

Together, Heather and I made a plan to increase her Amazon reviews. The strategy was simple: whenever someone mentioned Bad Romance on social media, we would ask them to consider leaving an Amazon review.

The sites we used:

• Twitter
• Instagram
• Facebook
• Goodreads

We were careful to send just a few requests each day, to avoid blowing up followers newsfeeds, and were thrilled to see it working!

The Results

We sent approximately 50 requests over the next month and watched Bad Romance’s Amazon reviews slowly tick up until we’d added 15 to the original 32.

That’s a 30% conversion rate!

Due to holidays and travel, our experiment took a bit of a backseat, but by December 20th, Heather’s reviews had climbed to 52.

Important Takeaways

1. This strategy works best when you catch readers deep in their feels after finishing your book. Once a few weeks have passed, their broken hearts have mended and they’ve moved on to other stories. Our response rates significantly dropped if we sent a request to someone who’d mentioned Bad Romance more than two or three weeks previously.
2. Book Twitter strikes again! Heather and I found Twitter to be the most responsive to our review requests and the people tweeting seemed really excited to engage with the author of a book they loved.
3. Goodreads response rates were much lower, but the number of people rating and reviewing Bad Romance was significantly higher. So we had a lot more to work with, even if most of our requests went unanswered.
4. It was the most difficult to search for posts about Bad Romance on Instagram. Unless they specifically tagged Heather, their post would slide by without our notice.
5. We didn’t find there to be much dialogue around Bad Romance happening on Facebook, so after 2-3 review requests, we decided to focus elsewhere.

Asking for book reviews is a long game. It isn’t a one-time fix to get hundreds of reviews. (Anything that promises such a thing would likely get your book banned from Amazon.) It’s a best practice, an ongoing habit to help convert positive feedback into tangible, long-lasting reviews.

And most importantly, be humble and be grateful. This person you’re contacting has spent their precious time reading your book. They don’t owe you anything at all, and the fact that they’re taking the time to share their love of your book is amazing. So make sure they know how grateful you are.

Now don’t be afraid. Don’t feel awkward. The next time someone sends you an email or tweets about loving your book, politely ask for that review!