It seems to me that independent publishers and self-publishing authors put great effort into obtaining reviews. The thinking is, if you have a quantity of (positive) reviews, folks will be more inclined to buy your book. To get those reviews small publishers and authors will give away thousands of their books for free, which is downright ironic considering the goal is to sell as many copies as possible.

​Yet out of potentially thousands of books given away, the likelihood is that maybe one in twenty will result in either a review or a rating.  At the end of the day, resulting sales will almost never justify giving out all those freebies.

​As a general rule, only Amazon benefits from this system. Since the majority of indie e-books are Amazon-exclusive, books given away in the hope of reviews pretty much universally draw readers to Amazon’s website, which the company uses to its exclusive advantage. Compounding the one-sidedness of this arrangement, the company can – and does – make decisions about which reviews it will and won’t allow. If the prospective reviewer hasn’t spent enough money there lately, they can’t post a review. If Amazon’s magic algorithm suspects any funny business, positive reviews may be removed without explanation, and getting them replaced can be virtually impossible.

​So, how many reviews does a book really need? Must you break the one-hundred mark to be successful? A thousand? When does the number of reviews have more to do with ego than book sales?

​From what I’ve been able to make out, readers don’t need to see huge numbers of reviews to buy a book. And, in many cases, the number of reviews may belie how successful the book really is. Readers do want to see at least some reviews. But there is a point at which more reviews will only go in one eye and out the other. If a reader gets a sense that, say twenty people think highly of a book, they will usually consider reading it themselves.

​Whether you should go to great lengths to secure reviews or just allow them accumulate organically is up to you and your publisher. Personally, I favor selective, pre-release submissionsto review sites such as Foreword Reviews and Readers’ Favorite, and to a curated list of book bloggers and individuals, so the book can show some early activity at launch time.  I am no longer a fan of mass giveaways, though. To my mind, giving away a lot of books in order to generate a few reviews to help sell even fewer books, defeats its own purpose.

BTW, I have a new book coming out at the end of May!

Herman Nature

Joel Bresler is the author of

Bottomless Cups

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