I've said on several occasions that reviews are an essential part of being a successful author. Even the bad ones, because this is the feedback that helps us to improve and really hone our craft.
Yet, it's probably the area of this journey I'm struggling with the most at the moment.
While I've been able to get some traction on Goodreads which is a step in the right direction, I'm going to give you a guess where the real review action is...
If you guessed Amazon, you would be correct.
Amazon is also the place I've got no reviews currently, so what this means is Amazon doesn't prioritize recommending my books to other YA Fantasy readers. This is an important part of my marketing strategy because as a new author, I need to stand out among the 100 000 plus books that get published on Amazon daily.
But Amazon won't do this until I get fifty reviews above four stars on one book.
I've even looked into pushing for Amazon reviews via a platform like Booksprout, but I've had to learn the hard way that this isn't always reliable because Amazon is really fussy about accepting reviews this way. Sometimes it does work, sometimes it doesn't. The best way to do this is still direct reviews.
So I've been trying to think about how I could incentivize my readers (current and future) to do this and I'm thinking of doing a giveaway on Social Media soon (probably end of the month!)
The concept is simple, for every five Amazon Reviews I get on The Confidential Heir - I will do a random draw for one of those five reviewers and send them a copy of The Emerging Heir for free in their preferred book format. I will do this until I get to the 50 reviews I need. So that's 10 copies of the Emerging Heir I'm aiming to give away.
All I ask is that you follow me on social media so that you can keep an eye on when I go live with this competition, and also so that I have a way to contact the winners. I want to keep this really informal and not introduce things like forms and email addresses because I don't want to collect your data, my goal is to generate Amazon reviews in the easiest way possible for both of us.
Here's to trying new things!