When it comes to running effective, flexible, and modern book marketing campaigns, Booktrovert is setting a new standard—far outpacing other giveaway platforms in features, value, and control.
📣 Call to Action Flexibility Booktrovert empowers authors and publishers with multiple CTAs including Giveaway, Sweepstakes, Pre-Order, Buy Now, (or mix & match!), offering marketing versatility across a book’s lifecycle. Goodreads, by contrast, limits campaigns to giveaway only, making it far less adaptable.
📚 Campaign Scale & Control Booktrovert allows up to 10 books per campaign, while Goodreads supports only one, making it inefficient for grouped titles, like series, authors’ backlist, or even seasonal campaigns. Want to give away more than 100 copies? Booktrovert lets you decide the limit, by number of books (Sweepstakes) or time (Giveaways). Goodreads Giveaways cap at 100 copies.
🔒 Visibility Options Booktrovert lets you choose public or private campaigns, ideal for targeted promotions or exclusive access. (Here are 10 Ways to use Booktrovert!) Goodreads? Always public, which restricts strategic customization and limits your creative marketing ideas!
⚙️ Giveaway versus Sweepstakes Mechanics Giveaways: Unlimited quantity for a limited amount of time, and participants claim their eBook instantly. You choose giveaway duration from 1-7 days. Detailed Analytics (optional add-on) will include email addresses for readers who claim a copy. Fulfillment is digital with a permanent license via Web Reader, Kindle, Kobo—depending on your settings. After the giveaway ends, the CTA will automatically switch to retail.
Sweepstakes: You offer a limited quantity of eBooks, and participants can enter to win. Entries are collected for the full 7 days of your campaign, then winners will be randomly drawn and automatically notified. Detailed Analytics (optional add-on) will include email addresses of everyone who entered. Fulfillment is digital with a permanent license via Web Reader, Kindle, Kobo—depending on your settings. After the sweepstakes ends, the CTA will automatically switch to retail.
Goodreads Giveaways run on an enter-to-win model, where readers must wait until the campaign ends, creating little momentum or real-time engagement.
⚡ Fulfillment & Retail Booktrovert giveaways and sweepstakes deliver instant digital fulfillment via Kobo, Kindle, and Web Reader. If a giveaway campaigns automatically switch to retail CTAs if they are shorter than 7 days, with links you choose to drive sales wherever you want.
Sweepstakes winners are automatically and randomly chosen, automatically notified, and have instant digital fulfillment. No action needed from the publisher!
Goodreads, however, requires you manually ship print books or limit your eBook giveaways to Kindle-available titles. There’s also no retail campaign option on Goodreads.
📊 Reporting & Data Booktrovert providesstandard engagement reports and offers detailed analytics, including email addresses for giveaway winners. Goodreads Giveaways give you just a list of winners—no engagement metrics, no reader insights.
💸 Cost & Value
Booktrovert campaigns start at $200 per title, with pricing based on campaign type and scale—no printing or shipping costs. Plus Booktrovert offers optional add-ons for even more advertising and reporting. Goodreads Giveaways range from $119 to $599, plus shipping and printing, making them more expensive for less control and insight.
🌟 Reader Experience & Discovery Booktrovert is designed with readers in mind—modern, intuitive, and engaging. It offers interactive features and discovery tools that encourage real-time interaction and curation. Goodreads, by contrast, is perceived as outdated and inefficient.
Bottom line: If you want to use a flexible, data-rich, and cost-effective platform for consumer marketing, Booktrovert is the clear winner. 👉 Launch your campaign on Booktrovert today
Smart consumer marketing isn’t about selling harder—it’s about creating buzz, building trust, and turning browsers into buyers.
First, what is consumer marketing?
The primary goal of consumer marketing is to increase discoverability for your book, both within and outside of the known target audience. It may include a number of different tactics, like:
Advertising (increase visibility)
Incentives (discounts, bundles, special packaging, etc.)
Engagement campaigns (to encourage a flurry of activity that others want to join, like giveaways, limited-time offers, author interactions, etc.)
These efforts work together to put your book in front of the widest potential audience, with a goal of sales conversion. Consumer marketing tactics can and should effectively fill your sales funnel.
Why does it work?
Well-planned consumer marketing fosters reader engagement in both the short and long-term. The more often consumers see a product, the more likely they are to follow through to purchase it. Add on a lot of organic online activity around that product (for example: likes and comments on posts featuring the book cover, excited chatter about winning a giveaway, emotional online responses to the moods a book evoked) and readers will buy and read the book to ensure they’re not left out of the conversation happening within their communities!
The ultimate goal of consumer marketing in book publishing is driving sales and fostering long-term reader engagement. Encouraging word-of-mouth recommendations, maintaining ongoing engagement through newsletters and social media, and offering special promotions or giveaways can help sustain book sales beyond the initial launch. By continuously nurturing reader relationships and filling the sales funnel with additional potential consumers, publishers and authors can fatten the curve ahead of the long tail dropoff of sales.
There’s a long-standing myth that book giveaways will cannibalize sales. In reality, strategic efforts can ensure that the benefits of book giveaways far outweigh any potential lost sales. While giveaways provide free books upfront, they often lead to increased sales in the long run as new readers who enjoy the book recommend it to others, leave positive reviews, or purchase additional books from the same author or publisher. Often a reader will purchase the same book they got for free in a different format! (Hint: Digital giveaways are cost-effective, offer extensive reach, and help drive print sales!) Here are some key strategies to ensure giveaways enhance sales rather than replace them:
1. Use Giveaways as a Lead Generation Tool
Build a direct marketing channel by collecting participants’ email addresses. This will allow you to offer exclusive discounts, pre-order bonuses, or future book recommendations, increasing the likelihood of future purchases. Do more with this list than just sell to them – practice empathetic marketing efforts to truly engage with these fans and, instead of replacing sales, giveaways will help establish a loyal customer base.
2. Offer Limited-Time or Exclusive Copies
To maintain perceived value, keep giveaways limited by time or quantity, or exclusive. This ensures giveaways act as promotional tools rather than permanent free alternatives to paid books. Consider:
Exclusive early access to members of your mailing list (or limit access to special book clubs, or the author’s street team)
Gift a copy of the book to readers who participate in online activities – posting a review, following the author on social media, sharing posts, tagging friends, etc.
Limited-edition bonuses like digital extras (a bonus short story, character art, playlist, etc.) that are only available to those who download the book during the giveaway window. This adds a sense of exclusivity even to a free item, and can drive urgency.
Run giveaways when certain community goals are met, for instance: “When we hit 2k Instagram followers, I’ll release a free novella!” This turns readers into active promoters to unlock free content.
3. Pair Giveaways with Paid Promotions
Instead of relying solely on giveaways, integrate them with paid marketing campaigns to boost overall sales. For example:
Running limited-time discounts alongside giveaways to encourage purchases from non-winners.
Upselling other books or merchandise after a giveaway.
Using retargeting ads to remind giveaway participants to buy related books.
4. Target the Right Audience
Instead of giving away books to general audiences, focus on specific groups that are likely to amplify sales by driving visibility. This includes:
Influencers, bloggers, and reviewers who will generate buzz.
Librarians and educators who may purchase copies for their institutions.
Book club members who may encourage group purchases.
5. Reach Outside the Target Audience
Don’t be afraid to cast a wide net! A giveaway is a low-barrier entry point, making it a perfect opportunity to test new waters and attract unexpected fans. By broadening your efforts, you are likely to discover new audiences with their own spheres of influence.
Advertise in unlikely (but aligned) spaces. Instead of just running ads or promotions in bookish spaces (like BookBub or Goodreads), try platforms that are less saturated but still relevant to your book’s themes.
Create cross-interest appeal in your messaging. When promoting the giveaway outside your usual reader group, highlight elements that appeal to broader interests, for instance: “Love stories with powerful women and epic travel? Snag this free adventure-romance before it’s gone!”
Rather than negatively impacting revenue, strategic giveaways can help you grow your audience, increase engagement, and drive long-term sales.
Tracking ROI (Return on Investment)
Any marketer or publicist will tell you that it can be tricky to tie one specific campaign directly to sales results. The path from visibility to conversion isn’t always linear. A potential customer might see a press mention, hear about a book from a friend, and then finally click on a digital ad weeks later before making a purchase. Because of this complexity, it’s more useful to think beyond just direct sales and instead focus on a broader set of performance indicators.
When organizing campaigns, be sure to set goals and plan to track metrics like audience engagement, website traffic, lead generation, or social media growth. These indicators provide a clearer picture of how your campaigns are influencing customer behavior over time. When evaluated together, they can help you understand the cumulative impact of your consumer marketing efforts, even if it’s difficult to pinpoint a single source of ROI.
Get Started Now!
Giveaways and other consumer marketing efforts are powerful tools not just for boosting immediate sales, but for cultivating long-term engagement and reader loyalty. Combine tactics to increase visibility with incentive-driven campaigns and smart audience targeting, to turn casual browsers into devoted fans. Strategic giveaways serve as catalysts for discovery and word-of-mouth momentum, especially when paired with paid promotions and authentic community engagement. And while ROI can be challenging to measure in a straight line, focusing on holistic performance metrics offers a clearer picture of sustained impact. Ultimately, successful consumer marketing is about more than just selling a book—it’s about building relationships that keep readers coming back for more.
We’re thrilled to offer NetGalley clients a streamlined consumer marketing platform for the widest audiences, while leveraging and retaining the professional community that exists at NetGalley. Learn more here, and see how it compares to Goodreads!
Sustainability has long been a hot topic in the book industry. With an environmentally savvy consumer market and labor force composed of people who want to make the world a better place, it only makes sense that publishers would lead the charge on sustainable practices. Sadly, this has not always been the case. Now, with rising costs of production, looming tariffs, and much uncertainty in the market there is no better time to face challenges head on and look for solutions wherever they can be found.
Those solutions are often found globally. The Green Book Alliance (GBA), a collaboration across Book Industry Communication (BIC) in the U.K., BookNet Canada, and the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) in the U.S., has been sharing sustainability resources and findings for five years. Brian O’Leary, executive director of BISG, told us “Environmental issues don’t know borders. As the largest publishing market in the world, what happens in the U.S. has an outsized impact on the industry and the world.”
Photo by Katrin Bolovtsova
No doubt geographic and geopolitical disruptions will continue to impact the book world this year. Publishers and partners will be discussing ways in which they can reduce costs, speed up production, and align with environmental solutions. NetGalley will be tracking these discussions at conferences and, importantly, demonstrating at least one proven and reliable way to help publishers and book professionals reduce their carbon footprint: Digital Review Copies.
For a book community that has been hungry for strong voices and authentic commitments to save the planet, perhaps this is the year we are ready for real leadership. We’ve all seen the industry slip backward into pre-pandemic practices of sharing physical ARCs instead of digital or audiobooks, all while regarding conference galley rooms with a bit of dismay.
“We as publishers need to push them to realize that this is a problem not only for the environment, but for the supply chain as well… It is a not good for bookstores, publishers or authors (who don’t earn a royalty from third party sales) that these pre-market [print] copies are out there.”
“One of the most impactful ways to improve sustainability is to NOT print ARCs or galleys. Digital galleys are just fine, and in fact, better for the system overall. During the pandemic, many reviewers were accepting DRCs, and we were really hopeful that that would stick. Unfortunately, many reviewers are reverting to their old systems of stacks of ARCs on their desks or in the galley room, instead of cataloging DRCs. We as publishers need to push them to realize that this is a problem not only for the environment, but for the supply chain as well. Those printed ARCs get picked up by the third party sellers on Amazon, who sell them for less and win the buy button. It is not good for bookstores, publishers or authors (who don’t earn a royalty from third party sales) that these pre-market copies are out there.”
Environmental impact at various moments throughout the supply chain is urgent for publishers to continuously acknowledge and make effort to minimize. O’Leary points out, “BISG’s work helps show how actions in one part of the supply chain play out across the industry. Content creation has become fundamentally digital, but we’re not always taking advantage of the opportunities digital provides.”
With a proactive commitment to LCP, a brand new NetGalley Reader, and audiobook early-listening solutions, NetGalley is a proven alternative to print review copies. It’s not just about amplifying our own product. It’s about providing answers to practices that are not only out of fashion, but out of step with our industry’s values. Not only are book files safe and secure thanks to the most up-to-date technology, publishers also benefit from fast, easy tools to distribute digital review copies far beyond the typical reach of print.
Let’s take a chunk out of the galley room and replace tables lined with paper, ink, and cardboard boxes with QR codes and directions for how and where to access digital review copies and audiobooks. We’re here to help!
With a proactive commitment to LCP, a brand new NetGalley Reader, and audiobook early-listening solutions, NetGalley is a proven alternative to print review copies. It’s not just about amplifying our own product. It’s about providing answers to practices that are not only out of fashion, but out of step with our industry’s values.
This article will be updated during the 2025 conference season with feedback from reviewers, publishers, and partners.
Check out our Tips for Publicists for actionable strategies, from pitching to follow-up to reporting, designed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the work you already do!
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Plus, watch the 2-minute video, Influencer Marketing & Beyond, for 3 quick ways to incorporate NetGalley into your efforts, no matter where you find your audience.
Publishing professionals from across the industry descended on Nashville, TN at the end of September to attend the Publishing Innovation Forum, hosted by the Firebrand Group. This premier in-person event was designed to unite individuals from various segments of the book publishing industry to share insights, explore new trends, and discuss strategies to adapt to a rapidly evolving publishing landscape. With approximately 150 participants, the forum encouraged collaboration and innovation, ensuring attendees gain valuable knowledge and connections to drive future success in the industry. Expert keynote presentations, and three dedicated breakout tracks for Business, Technology, and Marketing, resulted in lively conversation and important takeaways. For our audience at NetGalley Insights, we have collected some key themes and tips from the highly experienced speakers.
Attendees at the inaugural Publishing Innovation Forum, 2024
Session: Innovations in Book Promotion: Publicity Trends That Move the Needle
Speakers: Kimberly Sneed (Digital Media Director, PR by the book) and Marika Flatt (Owner, PR by the Book)
Kimberly Sneed and Marika Flatt of PR by the Book kicked off this session by explaining that the goal for publicity efforts is to drive author and book recognition, visibility, and overall exposure. The wider the name recognition in the world, the greater chance that book and that author have to build and grow. Exposure is extremely important in early promotional efforts because you are planting seeds for a long trail that follows, even into the backlist. Some important avenues for modern publicists to focus on include:
Podcasts: There are hundreds of thousands of podcasts available. Find the right ones in both subject matter and audience for your individual authors.
NetGalley and other platforms: Maximize title pages on every platform to include assets like videos, advanced praise, author pages or social media, etc.
Social Media: Both presence and promotion matter. Identify and engage with niche, micro audiences, prioritize authenticity, align your messaging with their values.
Immersive Storytelling Techniques: Design “expert” pages for your authors, create additional materials like exclusive content, serialized content, short videos, and adjacent narratives to drive engagement and customize media outreach.
One size does not fit all in book marketing and publicity. Step outside the box and don’t be afraid to try something new! No matter what, always connect and build on what you have. Sneed’s and Flatt’s approach is centered on flexibility, experimentation, and working closely with authors to tailor strategies to individual needs and audiences.
Session: Influencers vs. Community: Strategic Activation for Your Book Campaigns
Speakers: Sarah Walsh (Brand Strategist, Branch & Bramble) and Hallie Fields (Social Media Assistant Manager, NetGalley)
Each speaker presented two distinct yet powerful marketing approaches: Sarah Walsh highlighted influencer campaigns, while Hallie Fields emphasized community-driven campaigns.
Walsh showcased how partnerships with influencers can boost brand awareness, leaning on examples like #marcreadsabook and HarperCollins’ #shelvesinthecity. These examples demonstrated the importance of personalized and trend-focused initiatives. It’s important to note that these campaigns were certainly in the high-budget realm; however, there are lessons to be learned from these exciting campaigns that even a publisher with a smaller budget should keep in mind:
Jump on trends and interact with followers as part of the community, not an administrator or organizer.
Consider the best type of influences to engage. Micro influencers can have big engagement numbers.
Give influencers time and opportunity to tell their stories. Bring them to beautiful spaces, or give them Instagrammable assets.
Form ongoing partnerships, not just one-off posts, which allows the influencer to create ongoing content that is more organic and authentic.
Fields focused on examples from Camp NetGalley, a community-based challenge campaign, and #MyNetGalleyYear, an annually recurring checkpoint campaign. These examples encourage user-generated content (UGC) by asking audiences to complete a task and share it with their followers. These campaigns allow you to engage with, and unite, the entire community, and allow you to secure your brand’s place in a recurring social landscape.
Know your community. At NetGalley, we know our members love fun, nostalgic, interactive experiences, so we built Camp NetGalley with that in mind.
Prizes can be simple and digital! In the case of Camp NetGalley, it was a digital badge members can share, and which appear in their NetGalley accounts. For #MyNetGalleyYear, a template we created for them makes it easy for them to brag about everything they’ve read.
UGC is excellent to share back to your community, help them feel involved, and take some load off your own content creation.
Consider creating campaigns that can be recurring, which gives the community something to look forward to.
Both strategies – influencer campaigns and community engagement – underscore the importance of creating meaningful, relatable experiences that resonate with audiences, while maintaining authenticity and connection.
Session: Book Marketing at Any Budget
Speakers:
Kim Lauber (Vice President of Marketing at Abrams)
Ashley Marie Mireles-Guerrero (Director of Sales and Marketing at Familius Publishing)
Allison Marie Pond (Director of Marketing at Mad Cave Studios)
Jin Yu (Director of Marketing at Berkley/PRH)
It was exciting to see these top leaders from across the publishing spectrum in one space, delving into practical approaches for maximizing impact in the marketing, publicity, and advertising spaces. The collective in-house wisdom from publishers large and small, who publish across many diverse categories, was too vast to fully cover in this short article, but here are a few key points:
Know your audience: Identify where the niche is, where and in what format they will buy, speak to them directly, customize your metadata to reach them.
Maximize metadata to boost discoverability, and feed the search engine with more content – announcements, bumpers, reviews – which will expand your reach.
Not all marketing involves advertising, and not all marketing has to be expensive.
When you do advertising, consider self-serve ads where you can control where the spend is placed. If you do have an ad budget, consider Amazon ads which one speaker said “are expensive, but are worth it.”
Events are a good way to connect with your community. Library and bookseller communities are especially relationship-based. Be sure to identify what you want to get out of it before deciding to attend since they can be expensive.
Virtual events have lower cost and can work if you’re creative on how you approach them.
Give out QR codes or offer to include items in grab-bags, like bookmarks or other items, which are a great way to stimulate interest.
PR is a lot of effort, make the most of it. Continue to utilize the results and keep it updated, making sure to leverage any media hits by letting additional outlets know it’s being talked about.
Session: Building Brand Trust: The Role of Empathetic Marketing in Publishing
In this popular and engaging session, Lyman emphasized that understanding audience values and emotions is key to creating impactful marketing campaigns. By analyzing consumer patterns in reviews and social interactions, publishers can tailor their messaging to resonate with their audience, and shift from transactional hooks to more meaningful communications.
Our values drive our emotions, which drive our decisions.
Make small shifts toward empathy, like altering email subject lines to be more engaging vs. a flat statement or sales hook.
Example from Alleyoop: Their customer feedback popup doesn’t ask what kind of makeup they like, or why, but rather asks the consumer about themselves and what issues they want to solve. For instance, one response is “I can only spend 5 minutes on my makeup.”
To maintain authenticity as you move into more empathetic language, start shifting your hooks to focus on the consumer. Stop making statements like, “Available now!” and shift to how readers will benefit from it. Questions are a great way to do this. A more empathetic subject line would be, “Need more time with your family?”
Bottom line: Empathy strengthens the connection between brands and consumers.
Session: Challenges in Audiobook Marketing and How to Overcome Them
Barto began this session by pointing out three main audiobook audiences: those who want, need, or happen to discover audiobooks. She emphasized that each of these audiences listens to audiobooks for their own reasons and that marketers should keep each of them in mind when considering their marketing language and campaigns–your approach can and should be slightly different when promoting to people who love the audio format, versus those who need to listen to audiobooks due to lifestyle or accessibility constraints. And never forget about those listeners who don’t yet know that they will love audiobooks! A few tips from Barto:
Think about audiobook marketing holistically. Integrate audiobooks into the broader marketing efforts through all aspects of the launch and ongoing campaign efforts. Start by educating authors that the audiobook will be available and is just as exciting and desirable as the hardcover. Make sure you update audio metadata at the same times as you update the other formats’ metadata.
Incorporate audio-specific keywords in metadata. Keywords like “dual-narrator” or “full cast recording” are important.
Market the production process. Listeners romanticize the publishing and in-studio processes. Lean into this!
Encourage narrators to be part of the promotion. Offer them announcement assets to share, ask them to record in-studio content, and leverage their audiences.
Create custom content (bonus chapters, interviews, music, bloopers, etc). If you’re going to pitch bloopers as a fun, custom bit of content to media outlets, be sure you’ve asked the studio not to discard or cut these bloopers during the recording process.
Barto pointed out that some publishers still seem to hold on to the notion that audiobook sales will somehow cannibalize print sales, but there has been no evidence of this! If anything, consumers will seek out the format they want. Make it easy for them to find. Audiobooks are more likely to be an “in addition” purchase than they are to replace a print sale.
Overall Themes
As you can see, themes of audience-centric and empathetic messaging ran throughout all of these marketing-focused sessions. Our expert speakers encouraged a shift from pushing books at people and, instead, connecting with readers.
Remember that not every influential reader is a celebrity, and they won’t all ask you for thousands of dollars to promote your books. Identify your core micro influencers, niche communities, and those who are passionate about the types of books you publish. These are the influencers that will drive word of mouth for your books most effectively and authentically.
Don’t be afraid to experiment! Get creative. Find fun ways to engage with your audience. Try new advertising techniques and assess whether they work for you. Adjust as needed.
We are thrilled that the inaugural Publishing Innovation Forum was received so positively by attendees, who told us they were inspired and leaving Nashville equipped to try out some of the strategies outlined above. We hope to see you at another Publishing Innovation Forum in the future!
– The NetGalley Team
NetGalley team members at Publishing Innovation Forum, 2024: Lindsey Lochner, Kristina Radke, Hallie Fields, Tarah Theoret, Darcy Piedmonte
Guest post by Corrin Foster, Sr. Director of Book Marketing & Promotions, Forbes Books
No book marketing initiative exists in a bubble. While each has a purpose, benchmarks, and expectations, how a book marketing strategy works together to build book visibility and sales momentum as a whole is what’s most important. At the center of this philosophy, reader reviews are the golden thread that ties together every element of a successful book marketing campaign. These candid reviews penned by avid readers hold the power to transform casual browsers into buyers and from buyers into fans, followers, and author devotees. They guide readers through the millions of reading choices, to the book that most meetss their needs, whether that’s solving a specific business problem, providing the best gluten-free recipes, or offering a fantastical escape from everyday life.
Reader reviews are the golden thread that ties together every element of a successful book marketing campaign.
Need more reasons why reviews are vital to a successful book marketing campaign?
Reader reviews are the social proof that helps to convert browsers into buyers. They make readers feel confident in their buying decision and excited to read a new book. Generally speaking, the more reviews a book has, the more people read that book. And no matter where they are buying or borrowing the book, they’re likely checking the reviews on Amazon and/or Goodreads before doing so.
Reader reviews help advertising convert to sales at a higher rate. If ad dollars are being spent to drive potential buyers to Amazon to buy your book, those potential buyers need proof that the book is worth buying. Ads generally begin to convert to sales at a higher rate once there are 15+ reviews on the book page, so make that your first reader review goal.
Reader reviews have legs. They get shared online on retail sites, reading communities, blogs, and social media. They get shared offline between friends at brunch, at book club meetups, and in chit-chat with coworkers.
Reader reviews keep books active in Amazon’s product recommendation algorithm. Reviews create page activity. The page activity tells Amazon that there is interest in a book and they should recommend that book to more potential readers.
Reader reviews lead to more reader reviews. When readers see other readers sharing their opinions, they want to join in that conversation. That’s called buzz!
You never know when or where someone will sing a book’s praises, but that cannot happen without actively engaging with reading communities like NetGalley.
Here are some ways you can get started connecting with readers.
Make your book available on NetGalley. NetGalley is the first touchpoint between authors, publishers, and readers. They are enthusiastic readers, supporters of authors and independent bookstores. They are responsible for the success of many books.
Proactively seed books with your author network. Identify 15-20 people who would be willing to review the book the week of publication. Give them a copy of the book 4-6 weeks prior to publication so that they can begin reading and be ready to review.
Take advantage of the giveaway functionality of reading communities like Goodreads, StoryGraph, and LibraryThing. Every book you giveaway is a potential review and every review is an opportunity to attract a new reader.
Respectfully follow up with readers the week of publication.Thank them for their interest in the book, share any wins that may entice them to make it their next read (great trade review? Amazon bestseller? Readers love to know that!). Encourage them then to share their honest review on Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever they choose to engage.
No hounding readers for reviews! Every avid reader has a stack of books to read and yours might not be at the top of that stack. Give them time to read, enjoy, and form their opinion. And remember that sometimes the best review is no review.
Encourage honest reviews. As a publisher, we never like to see a critical review for one of our books, but readers should be free to share their opinions. Diversity in reviews not only helps books appeal to the right readers, it deters the wrong readers from buying a book and leaving a future critical review. Remember, it’s not about avoiding criticism, it’s about embracing the diversity of opinions that ultimately guide the right readers to your book while helping others avoid a mismatched reading choice.
Reviews act as a bridge between the author and the reader, offering valuable insights into the book’s quality, appeal, value, and relevance. They create a buzz; an ever-expanding conversation that draws more readers into the fold. To harness this potential, engaging with reading communities like NetGalley and proactively involving your network in reviewing your book are essential steps.
In a world where readers have more choices than time, the importance of reader reviews cannot be overstated—they are the underlying heartbeat of long-term book sales and visibility.
In a world where readers have more choices than time, the importance of reader reviews cannot be overstated—they are the underlying heartbeat of long-term book sales and visibility.
Corrin Foster, Sr. Director of Book Marketing and Promotions, Forbes Books
As the Sr. Director of Book Promotions and Marketing at Forbes Books, Corrin Foster develops and executes strategic book launch marketing campaigns and works directly with authors to help them build their brand, establish authority, and connect with readers. With nearly 20 years of branding and digital marketing experience, Corrin holds an MBA from Indiana University, completed the Yale Publishing Course, and was a Publishers Weekly Start Watch Honoree.
