Book Reviews on Goodreads: Part I

Getting book reviews is one of the most difficult things for an Indie author. You can give books away, but even giving them away to friends who have promised an honest review in exchange for said free book does not get you that review.

So, what are you to do? You can pay plenty of people to give you a stellar (although not always coherent) review, but anyone who agrees to review your book on Amazon for money is breaking Amazon's terms of service unless they disclose in the review that they were paid to give it. If you are paying someone to review your books, make sure they include this disclaimer. If you give people free books in exchange for a review, make sure you have them note that in their review. Amazon has sued thousands of businesses for posting paid reviews without disclaimers.

For those of us who don't want to get into the messiness of paying people for reviews, we often turn to websites like Goodreads to find people willing to review the books we write. I wanted to share some of my experiences with this.

One easy way to get reviews on Goodreads without forcing the reviewer to include a disclaimer on the review is using the Goodreads' Giveaways. At one time, these were only open to people willing to give out paperbacks, but digital content is now accepted. Since the people who enter and win these books do not have to leave a review (it is asked but not forced), they do not have to write any disclaimers about them. In some cases, they may leave a disclaimer, which is also perfectly okay. After all, they simply won the book in a contest that was impartially judged.

When I did this, I got an average return of 1 review for every 10 books I gave away. Not all of these reviews were positive--but the negative ones came from people who didn't seem to understand what they were getting. So, if you do this method make sure to spell things out. List a couple other traditionally published (and well-known) books that are similar to your book in the description. And, be prepared to give  away a lot of books in order to get substantial reviews.