What Readers Don’t Know

If Readers Aren’t Authors

They may not know this stuff. It’s perfectly understandable. You read your favorite author’s books, and that’s enough, right? It might be enough, unless your favorite author is not very well known and you are hoping he or she will write more books. In that case, you as a reader can influence whether or not your favorite author keeps publishing. How? By writing reviews.[bctt tweet=”How Readers Can Influence What Books Are Published.”]

Amazon Has Rules

And most people know nothing about them. But when you think about it, it makes sense. Amazon wants to recommend books that customers are likely to purchase. A book with one or two reviews, in their opinion, is not likely to be that book. So they recommend books that others have liked. How do they know what people like? By the reviews, of course.

I recently read a blog post that sums it up very well. The author of the post, George McVey, points out some of these Amazon rules:

I bet you didn’t know that after an author gets 25 reviews on Amazon, the company begins to include them in their “Also bought” and “you might like this” lists. This increases that books visibility on Amazon and helps put the book in front of more potential readers. That helps to boost sales.

When a book gets 50 or more reviews, Amazon highlights that book for spotlight positions in its monthly newsletter. This put’s the authors book in front of literally hundreds of thousands of potential readers. This can mean a huge boost in sales for your favorite author.

More Rules

 

Also in that post, he points out something I bet you didn’t know (I didn’t either.)

…leave a well-written review…because of a new app that came out recently called “Fakespot”. This app claims to be able to tell you how many reviews of a certain book or product are fake. By that they mean not posted by customers but by friends, relatives of authors or are bought reviews. How they determine if a review is fake is based on the quality of the review.

Readers Do Read Reviews

You’ve probably read reviews before deciding to purchase a book (or other products, for that matter.) So you already know the influence reviews can have. A number of bad reviews, and you don’t purchase. But more good reviews than bad, and–this is really important–a number of honest, well-written, and complete reviews go a long way toward influencing whether or not you will buy something.

[bctt tweet=”How To Make An Author Happy #readers #writers #authors”]

If you need some pointers about how to write a review that will be helpful to your favorite writer, be sure to check out McVey’s post. And please, leave those reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, and also other sites such as Barnes & Noble.