How to Get Book Reviews on Amazon

 

[Update December 7th, 2014: The program is currently off the shelves as their creators are upgrading it. We will inform you when it is back on line. Please leave a note in the comment section and follow comments if you want to be the first to know about the upgrade availability.]

 

Having your book reviewed on Amazon is one of the most effective way of increasing the popularity of your book. The benefit is double. On the one hand, it boosts the credibility of the book in the eye of potential readers and on the other hand, Amazon uses the reviews in its algorithm and the more positive reviews (4 stars and higher), the higher it pushes our book in the search algorithm.

Yet, getting reviews is hard work, as friends and family reviews, when we managed to get them, are frown upon by Amazon and at risk of being removed, and  identifying Amazon approved reviewers takes a very long time, especially as about 90% of them do not provide contact details, so a lot of time is wasted checking out unreachable reviewers.

This is where Publisher’s Review Accelerator, the new software developed by writers and software developers Amy Harrop and Deborah Drum, comes in very handy as it enables self-publishing authors and publishers to quickly find and contact potential reviewers on Amazon.com, Amazon UK and Amazon Canada.

Publisher’s Review Accelerator  works on both Windows PC and Mac OS X (just take care to download the correct version!) and automates the process of finding reviewers via the Amazon website, leaving the actual contacting the reviewers a human non-automated process.

It begins by performing an initial keyword search for a word or words relevant to your niche. It then lists the books in that niche and allows you to  choose any titles that have a decent number of reviews attached to them as shown on the search page.

Publisher’s Review Accelerator  then searches for those reviewers who have included contact details (an email address or a website) and enables you to export any or all of these individuals’ details to a spreadsheet.

All what is left to do is contacting them to see if they would be interested in a free copy of your book in exchange for a review.

Here is the program in action as shown in this video

Knowing that only around 10% of reviewers leave their contact details, using Publisher’s Review Accelerator  saves you a whopping  90% search through reviewers that are unreachable, thus sparing you both the time and the frustration of finding perfect reviewers only to discover they are beyond your reach.

Instead, your time is gainfully spent checking  out the personal profiles of only the reviewers who have left contact details.

The trick is then to  read what they say about themselves, select those who  sound like potential reviewers for your book and  add them to a shortlist. That shortlist  can then be exported as a CSV (comma separated values) file, which can be opened in a spreadsheet using a program such as Microsoft Excel.

This leaves you a considerable time gain best invested in contacting these people personally and ask if they would like to review your book.

Publisher’s Review Accelerator provides some help with this as well. Include in their package is a fairly detailed (14-page) PDF on the subject of how to ask for book reviews. This covers approaching potential reviewers by email (message template included) and how to get your book to them electronically. There are various ways of doing this, all with their own pros and cons, and Debbie and Amy set out the main options. They also recommend quite a clever method which involves taking advantage of one aspect of listing your Kindle e-book on KDP Select.

The program is currently available at an introductory price of a mere $37 which, factoring in the time gain it provides and the value of your time, pays back in no time, and has a 30 days money back guaranteed policy.

So, take a look at Publisher’s Review Accelerator sales page with the reviews of the product and jump on the opportunity !