Should authors pay for book reviews?

Information that every author needs.

It’s a question that’s courted more than a little controversy over the years, but there’s a significant difference between paying for a book review with no influence over the resulting review and paying for a review that is guaranteed to be overwhelmingly favourable, Aka those commonly found on the likes of Fiverr. Unfortunately, the distinction is often lost and in doing so a powerful marketing opportunity may be overlooked for the sake of allowing prejudice to influence thinking.

Let’s be honest, every author hopes his or her book will receive glowing reviews, but a handful of two line reviews from friends and family or poorly worded reviews from someone who’s been paid $5 to read and write a review for your book, simply doesn’t cut it. Now, before you take umbrage with that last sentence, we certainly aren’t demeaning the support an author gets from friends and family, in fact it often proves a godsend, but the truth of the matter is that a positive review from a widely known, professional and trusted reviewer is worth its weight in gold. Every book, whether it be by a known or unknown author publishing for the first time stands a chance of becoming a best seller, the deciding factor is often how quick it can build momentum and professionally written, insightful and compelling reviews are a major part of the success factor. The problem for most authors is that they sit on the fence, unsure which side of the argument to come down on.

At BookViral we believe that information is the foundation of success and we wanted to offer something more substantial than hearsay and conjecture. Now before we do, and for those reading this who are unfamiliar with the services we provide, let’s be absolutely clear and say we don’t provide paid reviews. We commission reviews as part of our promotions, providing exactly the same service as Kirkus or Publishers weekly. The difference is that whereas those esteemed bodies will take an author’s money and are quite happy to return a bad review, we screen the books we promote and if our commissioned reviewers return a bad review we return the authors money and we don’t publish it. Life is hard enough in modern publishing without paying good money for a bad review!

Now it’s clear that we all have ‘skin in the game’, so simply asking the authors we’ve worked with if they favour paying for professional reviews would add little value. We wanted to dig a little deeper and find a correlation between paid book reviews and increased book sales. We’ve worked with over 1800 authors in a little under two years and have an ever-growing author mailing list of over 25,000 so we are reasonably well placed to ask the most pertinent questions.

Whilst any information collected can be presented with a bias we wanted to keep our survey as succinct as possible. Now keep in mind that paying for reviews is a commonplace practice and when it comes to professional reviews they aren’t cheap. You’re paying for professional insight garnered over many years, often decades, and you can be confident that a highly experienced reviewer will read your entire book in full and follow clear guidelines in writing your review. The costs vary but  on the date this post was first published typical fees were  Kirkus, (standard service $425, express service $575), Blue Ink Reviews ($495 for the review to be completed in 4-5 weeks), and BookViral ($152  for review to be delivered in 12 working days).

Our survey was responded to by 1,237 authors and the questions we asked were:-

1. How many times have you paid for a book review?
2. How much have you paid for professional book reviews?
3. Do you believe paid reviews have had positive impact   upon your book sells?

So, should authors pay for book reviews? We would rather you cast an eye over the responses from our latest survey and draw your own conclusions, but it does still seem that a five star review from a top book review site still carries a great deal of kudos. In our first blog post titled The Secret Of Viral Book Sales we shared a formula for creating viral book sells and it should be remembered that compelling, professional reviews are one of the most powerful forms of publicity you can get. 

As always, it's great to have made the connection with you and we hope we have given you something to think about. We'd also like to draw your attention to the 2016 BookViral Book Awards. We value originality and great writing and if you are confident your book will meet our expectations you can submit it by clicking on this link SUBMIT BOOKS.

 

The Best Book Reviews For Increased Book Sales

There’s one truth we are loathed to admit. Book reviews no longer sell books like they used to!

It‘s a bold statement that needs quantifying and of course there are exceptions, but in the main this post is aimed at the 95% of traditionally published and indie published authors who struggle to get more than a handful of reviews for their books. More importantly, it’s underpinned by quantifiable data from our first white paper survey of over 1000 indie and traditionally published authors, along with a sample of our reader subscribers. We also need to be quite clear and say we are talking about crowd-sourced book reviews with entities such as Fiverr and Amazons poorly regulated reader reviews leading the way.

It would be wholly disingenuous to say that these reviews don’t have an impact on sells, but unless they run into the hundreds, with a weighting towards 4 and 5 star reviews then the impact is predominantly negative. There are three reasons for this. First the continuing purchase of fake reviews by spurious authors periodically raises its head. Most recently with Amazons action against fake reviews offered by sellers on Fiverr. Secondly, a handful of reviews are readily discounted when they are all 5 star and add little in terms of critical insight, and thirdly the impact of 1 star reviews is proportionately greater than 5 star reviews, especially when they remain highly visible and persist for perpetuity alongside your book.

Now we aren’t saying you should discount good reviews, but it’s the quality of the review which increasingly leverages the greater impact. That’s why the likes of Kirkus have continued to prosper, but poorly worded, over the top reviews that lack genuine insight do little more than act as fodder for publishers and authors to spin in their promotions. 

Look at Facebook book groups. Often numbering tens of thousands, in terms of members, with automated posts every couple of minutes, the mind boggles at the number of 5 star book reviews which are touted. Click on the link and in the majority of cases you will find the books sales ranking leaves little to be desired. That book may have 20 or 30 glowing reviews, but readers are becoming far cannier and a quick glance at a books sales rank and the way a review is written speaks volumes. There’s an old saying that good reviews help, at best, incrementally, and bad reviews hurt, at worst, incrementally but rarely do statements like these come with any quantifiable evidence to support them.

It’s worth taking a breather here and looking to the past. Yes, everything must change, but there are still lessons to be learnt. Pre kindle and the advent of the eBook revolution a great book review in the Times, Guardian or the Independent could propel an unknown author into the limelight. It seemed every major and regional paper had a book review section and their critics were held in high esteem. Now a days they are almost non-existent. Yes, they have been replaced by countless thousands of book review bloggers and websites dedicated to carrying the torch, but obscurity quickly prevails. In many ways we have come to expect far too much from book review bloggers. They are, in the main, the unsung heroes of the publishing industry, but reviews rapidly disappear into their archives and far too often the impact is readily lost. Of course, there are a few revered names in book reviews that endure, the most obvious being the The New York Times Book Review and The Sunday Times book club here in the UK, but look beyond them at the likes of Publishers Weekly and authors predominantly pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege of a review that engenders little real impact beyond book covers and author websites, whilst free reviews seem weighted towards big name authors who attract readers to the sellers site. It's no wonder then that authors game reviews on Amazon and the like.

So let’s return to where we started when we said book reviews no longer sell books like they used to! Award winning author Scott Wilbanks says "No matter how good a book may be, it doesn’t sell itself, not in today’s environment where the number of new publications is in the thousands per day.  You simply have to promote. There’s no escaping it. And to do so effectively, you need to leverage your voice” With the success of his debut novel ‘Lemoncholy Life Of Annie Astor’ Wilbanks is an author who speaks from experience.

A well written, insightful and above all credible book review is a great place to start, but it’s what you do with it that ultimately distinguishes its ability to have a significant impact on book sells. A powerful book review should not only be insightful and well written it needs to be highly marketable. If in doubt, look to the film industry. Each new release is preceded by a raft of reviews from notable reviewers that offer glowing testaments. They also form the backbone of most prerelease marketing strategies, leveraging the full power of the web and SEO. Unfortunately, woefully few authors have the breadth of knowledge to leverage SEO to its fullest potential and it’s placing many of them at a distinct disadvantage in an increasingly competitive industry. Even those who amass a decent number of reviews will not gain the impact they should if they simply rely on promoting links that send potential readers to a buy page.

It’s the right review that can propel an obscure author into the limelight. Kirkus has been the gold standard for many years and no one can deny that they’ve helped make a number of high profile bestsellers, but at $425 for their standard service and a 7 – 9 week turnaround or $575 for their express service and a 4-6 week turnaround there’s no commitment to long term promotion and no refund if they give you a bad review. Authors need to be selective in choosing partners to work with and more importantly need to find review partners that will work alongside them to actively promote their books.

Now we criticized Amazons poorly regulated reader reviews, but they have also provided authors with the means to maximise the impact of their best reviews. It’s called Editorial and is available through Amazons Author Central portal. If you are not using it you should be. Combined with proper HTML formatting there is real advantage to be gained here with the right reviews.

Of course, there will always be differing views and as always we aim to spark meaningful debate. We believe that book reviews no longer sell books unless they are highly leveraged using ahead of the curve SEO, well written, and insightful. In our white paper survey we asked a number of questions, from the authors we have worked with and a select number of our subscribed readers. We think the data speaks for itself.

 

We hope we have given you food for thought and as always we welcome feedback and comments.