Jessica Russell's Blog - Posts Tagged "ratings"
Do Reviews Lead to Sales?
Here's some info that may clear up some confusion for some of my fellow writers out there. I was at breakfast this morning with two friends of mine, who, like me, make their living writing web content but who also launched their first novel in the infamous 2020! 😮 Well, they got into a heated debate about reviews versus sales: One said "You must get good reviews and that will lead to sales." The other said "No no no, focus on sales and that will automatically take care of the review problem."
Naturally, I was suppose to be the tie breaker.
Well, they are both correct and they are both incorrect. Here's why:
A high rating and great reviews on Amazon (or wherever you sell your book) will definitely get you some sales. That's because when someone is considering taking a chance on a new writer, that person often wants to read reviews. if your rating is low and you have bad reviews, some customers will automatically pass. If they are on the fence and your rating is high and your reviews are good, they may very well get pushed off the fence in a good direction! So yes., reviews can be responsible for some sales. HOWEVER...reviews in and of themselves will not guarantee sales, because people have to SEE them for the reviews to benefit you. If traffic to your link has slowed down and no new eyes are seeing your book online, the reviews are useless, since no one is there to read them. In other words, reviews can get you sales if someone clicks on your link, but reviews can't get you the
CLICKS. Only advertising can.
As far as sales getting you reviews, again...yes and no. More sales obviously increase your chances of reviews, BUT...most people do not review the books they read. Experts estimate it's approximately one out of a hundred who read a book and actually review it. I know. Pretty grim. So sales alone do not guarantee reviews, and of course, there is always the problem with Amazon continuously deleting legitimate reviews due to faulty software that tells them the review is "fake." (insert eye rolling) So even if you get a pocket of sales and GET reviews, you may lose some to that nonsense. On the upside, yes...even if it is only one in a hundred who leave a review, it stands to reason that the more batches of "hundreds" you get, the better the chances are that more reviews will show up.
Ultimately, focus on advertising because it all starts with clicks. Then make sure your write up and cover are good, because those are the two things that affect sales the most for new authors. More on that next time. Hope that was helpful.
Keep Calm and Write on!
Naturally, I was suppose to be the tie breaker.
Well, they are both correct and they are both incorrect. Here's why:
A high rating and great reviews on Amazon (or wherever you sell your book) will definitely get you some sales. That's because when someone is considering taking a chance on a new writer, that person often wants to read reviews. if your rating is low and you have bad reviews, some customers will automatically pass. If they are on the fence and your rating is high and your reviews are good, they may very well get pushed off the fence in a good direction! So yes., reviews can be responsible for some sales. HOWEVER...reviews in and of themselves will not guarantee sales, because people have to SEE them for the reviews to benefit you. If traffic to your link has slowed down and no new eyes are seeing your book online, the reviews are useless, since no one is there to read them. In other words, reviews can get you sales if someone clicks on your link, but reviews can't get you the
CLICKS. Only advertising can.
As far as sales getting you reviews, again...yes and no. More sales obviously increase your chances of reviews, BUT...most people do not review the books they read. Experts estimate it's approximately one out of a hundred who read a book and actually review it. I know. Pretty grim. So sales alone do not guarantee reviews, and of course, there is always the problem with Amazon continuously deleting legitimate reviews due to faulty software that tells them the review is "fake." (insert eye rolling) So even if you get a pocket of sales and GET reviews, you may lose some to that nonsense. On the upside, yes...even if it is only one in a hundred who leave a review, it stands to reason that the more batches of "hundreds" you get, the better the chances are that more reviews will show up.
Ultimately, focus on advertising because it all starts with clicks. Then make sure your write up and cover are good, because those are the two things that affect sales the most for new authors. More on that next time. Hope that was helpful.
Keep Calm and Write on!
How to Easily Spot Fake Reviews
There are legitimate review services out there that have professionals read and review your book and publish their reviews to your Amazon author page. Such services aren’t cheap but they are sometimes helpful for newly published authors. My main message today, however, is buyer beware. Even some of the most reputable review companies are slipping these days. In fact, I did a “secret shop” on one of them recently and ended up asking them NOT to post the reviews that I paid good money for. I know right in this second you are all thinking that’s because it was a bad review.
It was not.
It was a FIVE STAR review full of compliments for me and lovely descriptive phrases. However, I didn’t want it published because I knew the reviewer didn’t really read the book. You never want an inaccurate review even if the reader gives you five stars. Accuracy is more important than rating.
In one section of my book the heroine, Catherine, leaves England for France but mitigating circumstances make her return. The leading man, Julian, welcomes her with open arms. He rolls out the red carpet, treats her like a china doll, caters to her every whim and she falls all over him in gratitude. Yet the supposed reviewer described that section of the book as “Julian and Catherine spending most of their time fighting like cats and dogs until the book’s last chapter.”
Yes, this was a reputable review service with a good online rating. I’d love someone to tell me how anyone could possibly describe what I wrote above as two people fighting like a cat and a dog.
The “reviewer” was taking a gamble: in most historical mysteries that have romance subplots, the leading pair spend their time fighting like enemies until the last 20 pages when they suddenly realize they can’t live without each other. That’s one way to spot a fake review. If the reviewer is obviously taking an educated guess based on the “typical” storyline in your genre, it’s fake.
Why a professional service would let that happen I don’t know, but if you can believe this, I gave them three shots and all three were fake. One described the leading lady as a “spitfire prone to temper tantrums.” Well, once again, that’s probably accurate in 95% of the nonsense romances out there. Unfortunately for that reviewer, mine isn’t one of them. My leading lady was refined, quiet, and a thinker as opposed to someone prone to emotional outbursts. So all three reviews were five star, but fake. I told them NOT to publish them. I don’t need a few more 5 stars at the expense of having wholly inaccurate info. being posted about my book and neither do you!
In addition to professional services, there are also people who review books simply to get points in a book club or hit a certain level as a top reviewer on Amazon. Something they do on a regular basis–and they all think they invented it, but they didn’t–is what we call in my line of work “spinning.”
I write web content for a living and a very short and concise example of spinning is this: suppose you get an order from a travel client for a blog on the best vacation destinations in Brazil. To use “spinning,” all you would do is go to a competitor’s website, pick yourself out a nice article from that site and rewrite it. By rewriting it I mean simply changing the word order around, swapping out adjectives and adverbs, and essentially giving the client the exact same information that’s in another article rather than researching and writing the original piece he/she is paying for. You change it just enough so it passes copyscape. (Copyscape is the Web’s plagiarism checker tool.)
Behold, spinning. It’s called a black hat tactic in my line of work and no professional ever does it.
Well, people who write fake reviews often use this very same tactic and it’s obvious when they do. Tip: if you see a “review” and every single line of that review is something that can be gleaned from the summary–or copied from another review–it’s highly unlikely that that person read the book. The odds are just north of impossible for someone to read an entire novel and not have one original thought about the story other than the facts in the summary. So reviews are important, yes, but don’t let anyone publish fake reviews for your book if you can help it. They are an embarrassment, and to web content writers out there like myself, their fakeness is painfully obvious. Write on!
It was not.
It was a FIVE STAR review full of compliments for me and lovely descriptive phrases. However, I didn’t want it published because I knew the reviewer didn’t really read the book. You never want an inaccurate review even if the reader gives you five stars. Accuracy is more important than rating.
In one section of my book the heroine, Catherine, leaves England for France but mitigating circumstances make her return. The leading man, Julian, welcomes her with open arms. He rolls out the red carpet, treats her like a china doll, caters to her every whim and she falls all over him in gratitude. Yet the supposed reviewer described that section of the book as “Julian and Catherine spending most of their time fighting like cats and dogs until the book’s last chapter.”
Yes, this was a reputable review service with a good online rating. I’d love someone to tell me how anyone could possibly describe what I wrote above as two people fighting like a cat and a dog.
The “reviewer” was taking a gamble: in most historical mysteries that have romance subplots, the leading pair spend their time fighting like enemies until the last 20 pages when they suddenly realize they can’t live without each other. That’s one way to spot a fake review. If the reviewer is obviously taking an educated guess based on the “typical” storyline in your genre, it’s fake.
Why a professional service would let that happen I don’t know, but if you can believe this, I gave them three shots and all three were fake. One described the leading lady as a “spitfire prone to temper tantrums.” Well, once again, that’s probably accurate in 95% of the nonsense romances out there. Unfortunately for that reviewer, mine isn’t one of them. My leading lady was refined, quiet, and a thinker as opposed to someone prone to emotional outbursts. So all three reviews were five star, but fake. I told them NOT to publish them. I don’t need a few more 5 stars at the expense of having wholly inaccurate info. being posted about my book and neither do you!
In addition to professional services, there are also people who review books simply to get points in a book club or hit a certain level as a top reviewer on Amazon. Something they do on a regular basis–and they all think they invented it, but they didn’t–is what we call in my line of work “spinning.”
I write web content for a living and a very short and concise example of spinning is this: suppose you get an order from a travel client for a blog on the best vacation destinations in Brazil. To use “spinning,” all you would do is go to a competitor’s website, pick yourself out a nice article from that site and rewrite it. By rewriting it I mean simply changing the word order around, swapping out adjectives and adverbs, and essentially giving the client the exact same information that’s in another article rather than researching and writing the original piece he/she is paying for. You change it just enough so it passes copyscape. (Copyscape is the Web’s plagiarism checker tool.)
Behold, spinning. It’s called a black hat tactic in my line of work and no professional ever does it.
Well, people who write fake reviews often use this very same tactic and it’s obvious when they do. Tip: if you see a “review” and every single line of that review is something that can be gleaned from the summary–or copied from another review–it’s highly unlikely that that person read the book. The odds are just north of impossible for someone to read an entire novel and not have one original thought about the story other than the facts in the summary. So reviews are important, yes, but don’t let anyone publish fake reviews for your book if you can help it. They are an embarrassment, and to web content writers out there like myself, their fakeness is painfully obvious. Write on!
