Book Reviews

When a book’s completed and uploaded online, if you’re self-publishing it, your work’s not done. No, by no means. In fact, it’s just the beginning of more hard work.

What? You’ll be thinking, I’m sure. Isn’t writing the book all the hard work? Is there more? But I’m done with the book! So you think!!

Far from it. I know, because I’ve been there! After uploading my books to Amazon, I thought that was it. Mission accomplished. I had learned through trial and error, how to format and upload my first book. I felt very happy. I had a book on amazon.com

Then after many months, I started to wonder why I didn’t have any sales.

So I looked at other books in Amazon. Hmmmm…..what is missing? What do they have that I don’t?

Aha!! Something caught my eye! Most books had reviews!! 5 stars, 4 stars or at worst, 1 star ratings. So I realised my book was missing reviews.

Why are reviews important? Well, they help to sell books on Amazon. Potential buyers would usually click on the reviews to read what other people had to say about the book. Then they’ll decide whether or not to click to purchase.

Now, how to get reviews? Ask my sister, or my buddy?

However, Amazon prefers verified reviews. This means that the person who submitted the review had to have purchased the book and read it before posting his review. Not many people would be willing to fork out money to buy your book, read it and then write a review and submit it. Some people just read the book and then put it aside. It’s too much of a hassle to write a review and then post it online.

Sometimes an author can give away free copies of her book to friends and ask them to post a review after reading it. She usually gives a link which they can click on and then post their review there. However, these reviews would be classified as unverified.

Nevertheless, a review is a review. So the more reviews a book has, the better the chance of getting buyers. The ratings also have an impact. More 5 star reviews would help boost sales.