An author needs book reviews. If you publish your book on Amazon, there is, I understand, a kind of honeymoon period. It’s a new book, and will appear above older books. But to keep its head above water, it needs good reviews, and fast. You can try to get your friends and contacts to buy it and post a review. Some will, and some won’t.
I’ve procured editorial reviews for my books. Unfortunately they don’t count as Amazon reviews, although there is a place on your Amazon book page where you can quote them, with attribution. You still need Amazon reviews. One of the editorial reviewers I used was Online Book Club. One of the features of their offer is that, if you like their review, you can request that their reviewer post their review on Amazon. That worked well for me with Fire and Earth.
Another option is NetGalley. They have a huge team to which they advertise your book for review. After a few weeks you may find you have a dozen reviews that you can request they place on Amazon, or none at all. The other downside is the time it takes from publication to getting those reviews. It probably won’t be within the honeymoon period. So what else can you do?
ARC reviews are Advance Reader Copy. The idea is that you get someone to read your manuscript, then post a review soon after publication, within the honeymoon period. If you can get your contacts to do this, then brilliant! You can gift them a copy so that they can be a verified purchaser, which gets acknowledgement on the Amazon review. But how many of your contacts can you get to oblige?
I’ve just signed up to Book Sprout. I’ll let you know how it goes in a future post. The idea seems to be that you pay a monthly fee and upload your manuscript, preferably in EPUB format. They then advertise it to their readers who like to read free books before publication, in return for reviews. They chase the readers to fit your publication deadlines. The only drawback seems to be that the review will lack the verified purchase badge. But it’s better than nothing.
Finally I will touch on ratings. Reviews and ratings are not quite the same thing. A review will say what a reader liked and/or didn’t like about your book. They have to give it a star rating, between one and five stars. A rating is when a reader gives your book a rating, but not a review. Personally I find that a bit irritating. If someone gives you a five star rating, that’s great. But you’d like to read what they like about it. If someone gives you one, two, or three stars, that hurts. But it would be educational to know why. Still, if you’ve read my post in Readers Club on Richard Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice, you’ll know that even really great best-sellers get awful reviews.