Will Work For Reviews, Why Authors Need Your Feedback

When I began writing books years ago, I thought the hardest thing to do would be to get people to read them. Even friends and family were excited when I completed my first book, but were slow to actually read it. I understood, everyone is busy and reading isn’t something everyone makes time for these days. I wasn’t sure if the public would start reading my books either. Then something awesome happened, I started getting calls and emails from my friends and family and they said they loved the book.

That was shortly followed by customers personally contacting me to tell me that they enjoyed it as well and they wanted to know when my next one was coming out. I was in a complete state of euphoria, to have so many people tell me they loved something I worked on  so hard. It was amazing. Then I asked them to write a review online for me. That’s where things got interesting.

Online reviews are essential to the success of a writer, something I learned about a year or two into this new adventure. Established authors have thousands of reviews from fans on platforms like Amazon, GoodReads, Facebook and others. When an avid reader is looking for their next book, series or author, the first thing they look for are the reviews. Having a great rating is important, but it’s actually the number of responses that influence someone the most. People will actually prefer a book that has a good rating, but thousands of responses over one that has less than a hundred but has a great rating.

I went back to my friends, family and those who had read my work and asked them to write a response on these platforms, something that would take them less than five minutes to do. They spent hours reading the book, what’s an extra five minutes to tell everyone they enjoyed it? Out of the hundreds of people I asked, I got five people to actually write one. Thankfully, over the years that number has gone up considerably by others who have checked out my work and liked it.

What I’m getting at is that if you like a story, share it. An author can sell a thousand copies of something they wrote but if they do not get any feedback from it, it almost feels empty. I want to thank everyone who has already written their responses and I encourage anyone who hasn’t to do so, not just for me, but for any writer whose content you’ve enjoyed. It helps more than you realize.