Finding Reviewers

On July 18, my novel The Paris Notebook, will be published by The Wild Rose Press. Their marketing people send review copies out to many review sites. But what about indie novelists? Who sends out review copies for us? We do. Yet one more business-oriented task when what we really want to do is write.

One of the problems I’m experiencing with Sister Issues is my utter ignorance as to how to find reviewers. Plenty of people ask me to write a review for them, even post it on Amazon. I do that sometimes, but my process is complicated. I explain it here. This post is not about my reviewing practices. It’s about how to find people to review my novel.

I asked one reviewer at very visible site who said she’d be delighted to review Sister Issues and I never heard from her again. I followed up with the owner of the site, he sent me an email that he was checking into it, but never heard from him again either. I’m not sure what went wrong there. Bad luck? The Ides of March? Mercury retrograde?

After licking my wounds over that spurning, I finally asked someone I had reviewed for…I’d read her book, and liked it, and tweeted about it. She said thanks and asked if I could write a short review on Amazon. So I did. It was really short and not professional in the least. But I gave her the 5 stars she deserved. And then I asked her how she got so many (mostly great) reviews on Amazon. She said “When someone tweets that they like my book, I ask.”

Simple! Except my book came out last October so that window has kind of passed. Then I was getting my taxes done and the tax lady said “What’s the name of your novel again?” And she wrote it on a post-it. I said “I hope you like it. And if you do could you please go on Amazon and post a review? It only has to be 20 words so you could just say “I love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, loved it!” She chucked and said she’d do it. Just that easy.

Then this morning, reading through my blog roll, I came upon Christine Nolfi’s post with more work-intensive but excellent ideas for indie writers finding reviewers. I’m going to try Christine’s methods at some point. But today I need to work on my novel-in-progress. The danger for indie writers is that we spend too much time marketing (this is how I explain my mad addiction to Twitter) and forget our first love. Writing the book that brought us here.