The Book Review Companion: An Author’s Guide to Getting and Using Book Reviews (Countdown to Book Launch, #3)

I received a free copy of this book from the author and voluntarily reviewed it.

I’ve been enjoying reading some non-fiction books about (self)-publishing among other topics this year, so when I got the email about this book I grabbed the chance to read it. I think reviews can be very important to a book’s success, so I thought it would be interesting to read a book about how authors can get reviews. And I was hoping this would be a good resource for that.

It’s clear the author has been around the publishing industry for a long time and know what’s he talking about. There is some good information in this book about getting reviews and multiple sources, sites and ideas of where to start. It’s definitely a good starting point for any (new) author who wants more reviews, but doesn’t know where to start or how to go about it.

On the other hand for some reason this book didn’t work as well for me personally. I didn’t really care for the writing style or tone of the book. Not quite sure what exactly, but it wasn’t as pleasant of a read as some of the other non-fiction books about (self) publishing that I’ve read. Some of the author’s ideas or tips don’t align with what I would recommend to authors. For example he seems to almost diminish the value of negative reviews, while I believe that both for authors and readers those negative reviews can be very valuable in making sure the right people pick up the book. ofcourse you do want more positive than negative reviews, but those negative ones have their place as well.

Then there are some things like how he suggest gifting reviewers a gift card to buy your book. I am not sure if it’s actually against Amazon’s TOS, but it comes very close to compensating someone for reviews. Which as the author himself points out in this book is okay, but only for the editorial reviews, not for customer reviews. So you have to be careful there. Same goes with adding your existing contacts to a mailing list like Mailchimp which he mentions later in the book, I think it’s always best to explicit get permission for this as you need to have permission to add them to such a list.

I also felt the author was trying too much to have the book be accessible for all kinds of authors, traditional, indie, new ones and authors who already have a few books out. And in doing so I think it missed a more specific focus. Some of his advice is more applicable for one group or another. And there are certain strategies like ARC teams which I think can be great for authors to set-up, which he doesn’t touch upon at all. There was a strong focus on networking. I think this is a good practice, but at times it felt the author focused a bit too much on that point.

There was a whole part about getting promotional blurbs from other authors, bookbloggers or review publications that was mostly new to me. It was interesting to read about this as I knew little about it, as my knowledge mostly comes from indie authors and most of those don’t seem to focus as intensely on this or mostly give out copies to other authors in their genre. I hadn’t expected the topic of blurbs to be in this book, but I do think it fit the overall topic as the process is close to getting reviews. I thought the inclusion of information about editorial reviews and the difference with customer reviews also was good info to have. And I was glad to see the author recommended starting early in advance with contacting people for reviews, which I think is very important if you want some reviews on release day. And it gives reviewers more time to read the book before then.

I thought the structure of the book was a bit weird sometimes, not sure what exactly, but sometimes it just didn’t feel quite intuitive to me the way the topics followed each other. There also were some specific examples he used that didn’t really illustrated much in my opinion. And the interview with one reviewer at the end of the book felt like it missed it’s mark as I would rather have had advice or opinions of multiple reviewers for a more broader viewpoint.

To summarize: While this book didn’t fully work for me I do think it has some good information especially for new authors who don’t know where to start the process of gathering reviews. It’s clear the author knows a lot about the industry and the topic and there is some good advice and sources to get you started on getting reviews. For me personally it didn’t have as much information I didn’t know yet, but there were some parts about networking, editorial reviews and gaining blurbs that was new to me. The writing style didn’t fully work for me and I thought the way the book was organized didn’t feel always as intuitive somehow. There also were some practices or things he recommend that don’t fully mesh with the best practices that I personally would recommend to authors. I thought the book tries to focus a bit too broadly on traditional, indie, new and advanced authors and misses some specific tips for each audience due to that. And there are also tips that work best for only some of those groups. All in all I do think it’s a good starting point especially for new authors who want to know more about gathering reviews, it just wasn’t fully the book for me or what I had hoped for in this book.