Paying for Reviews
There’s some hubub going around today about paying for reviews (and I’m gleefully immersing myself in that to distract myself from a major personal disaster going on at Lee Kiota). I’ve talked about about it before. I think it’s gaming the system. Not stupid, per se, but playing dirty.
I’m not sure how much of an impact it has because fake reviews =/= word of mouth with is still the primary way books sell (it’s just some mouths, like those that appear on TV, are bigger than others.) In my own experience my best selling, by a HUGE amount, self published work is the one that still has zero reviews (holy hell, it does have one! When did that happen?) And the books I have with the best sales period? The ones that came out through KHP.
Trying to find a logic in buying readers’ habits is a Lovecraftian task. You’ll go mad.
Point: I’m not sure reviews sell books anymore than anything else. Why pay for them? If you buy reviews of a shit book to sell it people will point out it’s a shit book and your sales will sputter. Also, there are loads of ways to get reviews for free, like GoodReads’ Giveaways, or, you know, networking with authors and reviewers and offering review copies. Or just asking people who email you praise to post it someplace other people can see it.
Furthermore, these sites popping up naming names…aren’t completely verifiable. I mean, it’s a shit business that makes public the names of their clients when no legal wrongdoing is happening. Grain of salt is all I’m saying.
Personally, I’ve never paid for reviews, unless you count buying copies at cost, or postage to send them out. And I HAVE been paid for reviews, but I was paid by a third party as a contributing author to a webzine, NOT by the author or publisher.
I have no plans to do so when I can buy stuff like beads and promo stickers, and, you know, Taco Bell, instead.
Edited: Oh, right. Linkage.
My $0.04, adjusted for inflation: Reviews are good for morale. But for selling books? Not so important. Now I’ll go and sound like ye olde broken record again, but by far, I think the two most important factors are 1) writing for a focused, stable, long-term audience and 2) having a decent, professional cover.
My perspective on reviews is a little different. Paying for GOOD reviews is dishonest, Actually, requesting people you know to give or post good reviews is a little iffy, people you like are going to do their best to find the good points and downplay any negatives, which makes those reviews a doubtful source (it’s very frustrating to find that there are 20 excellent reviews that all appear to be from someone related to the author. Maybe it’s good, maybe the person just has a supportive family). But paying for someone with some credibility to review your book honestly is a little different. Kirkus Reviews offers this service to self-published authors(I’m not a fan of it). For $500 you can get a review to use (or not) with the Kirkus name on it, although you have to specify that it’s from their paid service (they have to make money somehow, I guess, without totally compromising their credibility as a review source). I can’t remember details, but I think there are some minor promotional things they offer along with that as well, in some cases. Kirkus is a well enough known publication that there was outrage when it almost shut down, so the Kirkus name may snag the attention of booksellers and librarians, even if the review is through the paid service. I would say getting individual purchasers for your work who keep coming back has a lot to do with name recognition and genre preferences (and also price) but to gain more general recognition, something like that can be helpful.