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How to Reach Out to Reviewers: a Publicist’s Guide

November 8, 2019 by Kimberley Grabas

Book publicist Ben Cameron has been in the game for twenty years, working with both traditional and self-published authors.

But he’s noticed a bigger change in the publishing world in the last five years than he has in the last fifteen. 

“That’s come down to the self-publishing revolution, and the revolution in ebooks,” Ben observes.

He recently talked to us about these changes — and what they might mean for self-publishing authors’ publicity games.

In this article, he offers his professional insights on what kinds of reviews are out there, how to find them, and how to get them. Let’s take a look at what he has to say.

TYPES OF REVIEWS

First up: the types of reviews out there that you can secure. As you might expect, the Internet’s revolutionized this quite dramatically, such that Ben now divides them into two categories: professional reviews, and “real people” reviews.

Professional reviews 

Professional reviews are reviewers paid by media companies to review books. Places like Kirkus Reviews, The New Yorker, and The Guardian are a few examples.

These tend to work best for literary or academic books — but their standing in the industry is so great that even just one of this type of review can make a big difference for any book.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Blog, Business of Writing, Marketing & Promotion Tagged With: book reviews, outreach, publicist

Launch Higher: How to Get Book Reviews Before Your Launch Date

June 7, 2017 by Kimberley Grabas

Launch Higher_ How to Get Book Reviews Before Your Launch Date _ YourWriterPlatform.com

We all know that reviews sell stuff. After all, when’s the last time you took a chance on buying something online, sight unseen, without checking the reviews? You want to know what other people who’ve already bought it think so that you can be sure you’re making the right choice.

That’s called social proof—when seeing that other people like something encourages you to try it yourself. And social proof isn’t just useful when buying a phone or a new pair of shoes. It sells books, too!

But reviews can feel like a chicken-and-egg situation sometimes. You need reviews to sell books…but you need people to buy your book in order to read and review it!

What’s a new author to do?

Get reviews before the book even comes out, of course!

You can get reviews even before your book launches—and doing so can help you launch your book higher, faster, because that social proof helps to snowball your exposure and your sales.

Let’s take a look at a few ways to start getting reviews to flood in before your book launches! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Blog, Marketing & Promotion Tagged With: author marketing, book marketing, book promotion, book reviews, free marketing for books, how to build book buzz, how to get book reviews, how to promote a book, how to sell more books

How to Get Reviews For Your Book (Without Begging, Bribing or Resorting to Subterfuge)

February 9, 2014 by Kimberley Grabas

How to Get Reviews for Your Book (Without Begging, Bribing or Resorting to Subterfuge) _ YourWriterPlatform.com

So you wrote a book.

And it’s truly a thing of beauty.

Prose polished to perfection, you’ve lovingly crafted your masterpiece in the stolen moments around an impossible schedule.

You’ve commissioned the most beguiling of covers, invested in an ace editor and painstakingly tweaked the interior formatting to ensure the delicate sensibilities of your reader will not be unexpectedly jarred by a rogue font pairing or flubbed folios.

It’s time.

Time to share your creation with the world.

Time to receive the glowing appraisals and positive feedback from your appreciative fans and the top book reviewers in the industry.

But hold up a minute. You know your book is the cutest, smartest, most precocious book in the world–obviously–but, how will top reviewers or your adoring fans know, unless they read it? And how will they know to read it, if there are currently no reviews encouraging them to do so?

Gnarly catch 22.

How on earth do you get reviews for your book (so you can sell more books, so you can get more reviews to sell more books)?

Do Book Reviews Impact Book Sales?

Before we get knee deep into the “how” of getting book reviews, let’s take a look at why (or whether) we need them. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Blog, Marketing & Promotion Tagged With: book reviews, getting reviews, reviews, reviews and sales

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