Promote Your Work: Get Your Book Reviewed

By Author: Edward Hasting-Evans
Total Articles: 1
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So you've written your first novel, short story, comic book or other work and it's good. You have now also got a publisher interested or you are going down one of the many self-publishing roots (such as ebooks/e-books or we-publish.com as examples). So it's time to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your hard labour to date, right? Unfortunately, no.

Publishers of any kind are first and foremost in a business. This means they are driven by the desire to make profits and some will have shareholders to answer for. They also realise that most first-time authors are unlikely to sell many books, so with the cost of printing there will be little money for promotion. This essentially means that you have to do most (if not all) of the work to ensure that people know your work exists. Because if people don't know it's there, they definitely can not buy it.

But as an author the prospect of promotion can be daunting, and it will certainly be very hard work. I am sad to say that there is no easy guaranteed formula. However, there are ways and means of promoting your work that are not as expensive as others, and they ...
... can be very effective. For example, getting your book reviewed.

Many people will choose to read reviews of books before they purchase and this typically means visiting the internet and trying to find out what people are saying. If your book is not reviewed no one will read about it, and sales will suffer for it.

There are many sites out there that carry book reviews in one form or another, however some are more likely to increase sales than others, so it is these you should focus most of your effort on, at least initially. For starters you may have noticed that on portalmania there are links to Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk with every review (see an example here: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). These links go directly to a page where a visitor can buy the book, so they've just read a review saying your work is good and have a quick easy option to buy, through a reputable company. Such a direct link will help to increase sales because you are not relying on them to remember and then find the book next time they are at their local book store (who may not even be carrying it!). So start searching at Google, Yahoo!, or one of the other engines and see what's on offer.

Now you've got a list of sites that review books and you need to approach them. As far as I know all (or at least 99.9999999...%) of sites will be more than happy to be contacted by authors who wish to have their work reviewed. A fair few also have some form of mechanism for doing this, such as with portalmania's
contribute and many others do as well.

When writting to these website owners make sure that you've spent a little time on the site so you are comfortable with what they do, how they present reviews and information and a little of the ethos of the site. You don't like receiving generic email's that could be sent to anyone do you? Well these website owners don't either, so you are much more likely to get a quicker response (or a response at all) if you can personalise your email to some extent so it fits in with the site you are trying to get reviewed on.

In most cases you are likely to be sending an email (in one form or another) to these people. If you have a website for your title (and I'd strongly recommend it) then you should include links to the site. This way potential reviewers can quickly, easily and conveniently get a feel for your book (particularly if you include an excerpt on the site). This can go a long way to bringing the reviewer around to reading your book and then reviewing it.

But most importantly make it easy for the reviewer to get hold of a copy of the book! Either offer to send them a hard-copy (asking for their address in the email) or to email a PDF document. PDF is a good format for this because it will open on most operating systems and will maintain all your formatting, ensuring you don't get odd line-breaks and punctuation when it's opened at the other end!

You should also make it clear that you are available for interview by any convenient means, such as phone, email etc. Author interviews that accompany a book review (see an example here: Moem The Beginning - Book 1) can be very powerful. Think about it, a potential buyer has just read a review which suggests that the book could be good, and that they might enjoy it. They are then given an opportunity to get a closer look at the author, to read about their trials and tribulations. All of a sudden you are no longer another anonymous author trying to sell books, you start to become a person. The reader then becomes more involved with the book or story and is potentially more likely to buy.

A word of caution. It might all sound very easy from the above, you know get some reviews, do some interviews and bingo! I'm going to sell a million books. Well no, but the point is doing this after publishing work can help you and your work gain more exposure which will help sales, as long as it's good of course.

You will also need patience, which if you've gone through the processes of getting published I imagine you've got now. Most website owners don't review full-time, they often have jobs and other demands on their time so don't be disappointed if it takes time.

Good luck with your projects!
About the Author ----
Edward Hasting-Evans has been reading and reviewing books for the web for a fair while. He now runs portalmania's book reviews (www.thebookportal.co.uk).

You may use this article as long as it isn't changed in any way, this resource box and all copyright statements are included and the link to portalmania's book reviews is active (clickable). © Copyright Edward Hasting-Evans 2003.