The importance of asking for reviews
I’ve been thinking about the importance of adding ‘about the author’ pages to the books I self-publish, especially the ebooks. It’s common practice in the traditionally published but seems to be lacking in those published by the authors themselves.
The advantage of an author page is you can include links and information about anything else you’ve written. And in 2013, when the original version of this post was first published it appeared the CEO of Goodreads, Otis Chandler agreed with me. Which is always very nice
Apparently, their survey showed that when readers were asked what they wanted to do when they got to the end of a book 83% of respondents said they wanted to find out what else the author had written. The survey is 10 years old now but I suspect the learning still stands. And when I pay attention to my own behaviour I follow the same course of action for any book I’ve enjoyed reading.
What was more interesting though was that in the same survey, 35% of readers also wanted to read other people’s reviews. Given the increasing numbers of people who are now reading ebooks, we are probably not looking at insignificant numbers. For every 100 people reading a book, there are probably at least 35 who want to read the reviews.
The takeaway from this is that it’s vitally important to encourage readers to add reviews to your book listings on websites. But how can you do it? Perhaps the easiest way is to just ask them. After publishing the 2nd edition of LinkedIn Made Easy, whenever someone got in touch through the network telling me they had read the book I would ask them politely if they might consider adding a review for me. A surprising number of them did, and after they had done so often took the time to let me know. By this time we had already connected through LinkedIn and were starting to build an online relationship.
When it came to writing the third edition way back when, I followed a similar process, but this time I had some reviews to add to the section of the book devoted to ‘praise for …’. I contacted everyone I knew who had left a review and I asked if I could add it to the book, offering them a link back to their site at the same time. Once again, a few of them agreed and I was pleasantly surprised that as a result of this, my book was recommended in the work of other authors simply because they’d found out about it through the reviews.
It doesn’t have to be difficult or take too much time to gather a substantial number of reviews. In fact, if you have beta readers you might ask if they would kick it all off when the work is finally published.
(Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)