- When do you remove reviews?
Can I give free or discounted copies of my books to readers?
Do you remove reviews posted by friends and family?
Do you remove reviews about
earlier versions of updated books?
All valid questions,
and we're going to discuss
more about how to get reviews
for your book in today's episode
so make sure you stay tuned.
Imagine winning $5,000 for your self published book,
get more details from our sponsors,
the North Street Book Prize competition
later in this video.
Hey, I'm Dale L Roberts,
a best selling author
as well as a self publishing advocate
who wants to show you how to publish books that sell
and today I'm going to talk a little bit more
about the importance of book reviews
and more importantly,
how Amazon really recommends that you do that
and still, you know,
stay within their terms of service.
The importance of reviews is simply this:
by having someone review your book,
it's getting social proof
because you can brag all you want to about your book,
you can say it's a best seller,
but at the end of the day,
people want to have third party credibility
in order to influence their decision
to purchase your book.
That's where reviews come in.
And obviously, having no reviews
gets it to where someone's going to be
a little leery about whether they want to buy it or not.
Because, obviously, you're publishing within a niche.
And there's other books that may already have reviews.
And they might go after the ones with reviews
than say, yours without it.
So that's why we want to make sure
we get you a quick with as many reviews as possible
so it gives the customer a more informed decision
when they go to buy your book.
So what is Amazon's stance
when it comes to the reviews?
Customers value unbiased book reviews,
you're welcome to encourage others to read your book
and post the reviews on its Detail page.
In fact, Amazon went on to further answer four questions
when it came to book reviews
and those are the ones that I discussed
at the very outset of this video.
Number one, when does Amazon remove reviews?
There are a few things that Amazon considers
when removing some reviews.
Number one, does the review violate
their community guidelines?
And the community guidelines is fairly in depth,
I could probably do an entire hours worth of a video
about the community guidelines,
I just recommend that you just Google up
KDP community guidelines for reviews,
find out more details.
Number two, is when two titles were incorrectly linked.
So for some reason, they took one ebook from an author,
and they took the print book
of something altogether different
and got linked up somehow,
let's say it was
a completely different publication all together.
And they had two reviews mixed up
when it shouldn't have been there in the first place.
So it's every now and then,
it's a rare occasion
that something gets linked together for whatever reason.
And number three is if a review disappears.
Now sometimes reviews disappear.
There's a number of reasons why they do that.
If for some reason you're like
I don't know why my mom
or my best friend or one of my followers,
put in a review, it's disappeared, what gives?
What they recommended is not you, the author do this,
but you recommend the reader do this,
that you can reach out to community-help@amazon.com
and you can ask why it was removed from there.
The second question was,
can you give free or discounted copies
of your books to readers?
Yes, (dinging)
but you cannot have any kind of demand.
So there can't be any kind of an exchange,
or any way of influencing that person.
So you can't say
I'm going to give you this free copy of my book,
but you have to leave a review.
Sadly, that is an exchange.
You can give them the book and say
it would be nice if you reviewed it,
but you can't say hey, you have to do it.
And the next one is no incentives.
So you can't say inside your book,
I'm going to give you some Tiffany's jewelry
if you leave a review of my book.
Yes, by the way,
there was an author that did that at one point.
And you can't say,
I will give you a $5 amazon gift card
if you leave review of my book over on Amazon.
Amazon doesn't like that.
Again, that's kind of like influencing the the reader
to leave, say, a positive review of some sort.
You don't want to do that.
The third question was does Amazon removed reviews
by friends and family?
In their words, simply being friends
or liked on a social media site
will not get a review removed.
Now, I've got my stance on this one,
and I'm sorry,
I'm gonna have to put my tinfoil hat on this one.
(glitching beeps)
Amazon actually owns a social media platform
called Goodreads in which you can actually
put your reviews there
and some of them you can actually get it
to where it's linked to your Amazon profile.
So then it would put all those reviews
over Amazon's website and vice versa
and also to integrate with Goodreads,
you can actually log in
with one of your social media accounts, including Facebook.
So there is that integration there.
So this is where the tinfoil hat comes in.
Some people have believed
that if you do that integration,
it starts to kind of mix up
and it removes that separation of church and state
and it becomes a little bit more messy.
And then they start to see
that there's an unbiased relationship
that is soiled by your connection with them through,
say, Facebook.
Now they say,
it's supposed to be good,
that you should be fine if they're a social media follower,
that it's not going to affect you.
But I kind of this is my stance on it.
What do you think?
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If you'd like to enter for a chance to win
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head on over to winningwriters.com/Dale.
And the last question
does Amazon remove reviews about earlier versions
of updated books?
Again, I got to kind of go over to Amazon
in this one and they actually state
customers may call attention to aspects of the book
that you've changed.
This may make content in earlier reviews irrelevant.
However, we won't remove the reviews
if they don't violate our community guidelines.
You might want to update your book in some of these cases.
Now they show you how to update your book
inside this whole post right here
and they also tell you how to notify customers
that have earlier versions.
I've had some issues in the past and with some of
my publications where I updated the interiors.
But for whatever reason,
it didn't go across all devices.
So say for instance,
someone bought your book back in 2015.
You updated it in 2020.
You sent a notification out to all the customers
to update it.
Sometimes it just doesn't work for all devices.
Now that you know how to get reviews for your book,
how exactly do you market the stinking thing?
Actually, I'm going to tell you the 10 best ways
to market your book in this very next video
and in fact, Amazon gives you deeper insights
in how to do that.
So you don't want to miss out on this one.
I will see you in the next video.