What Lengths Would You Go To Get a Review? - Lynne Garner
Most writers realise reviews help sell books. Grief even the courses
I teach via WOW have reviews attached to them (and before you ask they are real reviews written by real students). To demonstrate what I mean I pulled a few books from my
shelf and discovered many had a review or two on the back cover:
The Writers' and Artists' Year Book (a little dated 2010)
The Writer's Handbook (again a little dated 2010)
The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler
The Penguin Guide to Punctuation
How to Write a Children's Picture Book Volume 1: Structure
by Eve Heidi Bine-Stock
So what options do you as an author have for obtaining these reviews?
Well you could follow the route traditional publishers have used for decades by sending out review copies and keeping fingers crossed the book is reviewed. You could perhaps offer a give-away as I did via Amazon with my children's picture eBook 'Clever Rabbit.' My return for giving away 830 books was three likes and a single
fairly positive review. So quite an expensive exercise!
You could pay for a review and
there are plenty of companies that offer this service. However I've researched some of the companies offering a reviewing
service (BlueInk Review, Reader Review, Palmetto Review, Kirkus Reviews and Divine Grace - please note I'm not endorsing any of these services, they were used for research purposes only) and none of them state they will give you a good review. So it seems a
little dumb to pay (these review services are expensive) for a review when you're not even sure you'll be happy with
what they write.
You could rely on family and friends. But let's be honest they start with good intentions but still months down the line have still not put up that review for you. Perhaps as some writers have started to do you write your own reviews under a pseudonym and post on the web or even tweet positive things under several twitter accounts.
So my question is what lengths would you go to get a review?
Lynne Garner
Please visit my blog: Fuelled By Hot Chocolate
Unashamed plug for my writings eCourses that start 6th October 2012
Comments
Lee - basically what you call a review is what I call a critical review (or appraisal) essentially in so far as no I don't expect the reader to have read the book. I expect there's all kinds of ways we can argue whether a review can/should be 'critical' but it all just highlights how if one's not using the same terms of reference then as Wittgenstein says 'language lets us down at every turn.' Now once more to try and prove I'm not a flipping robot!