Book bloggers and reviewers help sell more books.
There is no question about it.
I’ve heard one author remark that when the book is first released, a single review is equal to at least 10 sales.
At BookBuzzr, we believe in this so strongly that we’ve spent considerable resources creating Freado – a website exclusively for book bloggers and reviewers. And we connect with the most influential book bloggers out there with our “Life of a Book Blogger” series on the Freado blog.
So when I recently ran across a book named “Book Reviewer Yellow Pages” I spent less than 10 seconds making the decision to buy it.
What I Liked About the Book
The mind of book reviewers can be quite hard to fathom. And newbie authors often get it wrong by being too pushy, sending out spammy emails, targeting the wrong bloggers or following up too soon. The author goes into detail about how authors can work with book bloggers in marketing their books.
The ‘Sample Pitch Letters’ section is insightful and provides templates of bad and good pitch letters. It shows you how to approach book bloggers and what their expectations are when you reach out to them.
As book marketers, we often tend to forget that book bloggers are doing us a favor by talking about our books. The ‘Author Etiquette’ section contains several gems of advice that will help us break out of our mindset and approach book bloggers in the right way. Even though the advice in this section is fairly basic (“send a thank you note to reviewers that review your book”, “know your genre and approach only those bloggers that are likely to be interested”, etc.), it is still valuable as we tend to forget these basic tenets in our rush to be visible.
The meat of the book lies in the detailed information that the author has collected about hundreds of book bloggers. It’s even more valuable as this information has mostly been supplied by participating bloggers who are willing to be approached by authors. And also because email contact information for most of the blogs are provided.
Suggestions for Improvement
While this book is a fantastic resource for authors, I’m hoping that the next version will be even more useful. Here are some suggestions that I hope the author will consider for the seventh edition of the book.
Wishlist Item 1: Provide information in a sortable table format
If the information is provided as a sortable excel table, it will probably be even more useful as you can run sorts and searches on various fields.
Wishlist Item 2: Provide information about estimated traffic
This one is probably hard and most bloggers will probably not be willing to share traffic numbers. However, even an estimated range (50 to 100 visitors a day, 100 to 200 visitors a day etc.) will be hugely helpful to authors in focusing their resources on the right blogs.
Wishlist Item 3: Provide information about date of last blog post
As we all know, many blogs become inactive due to various reasons. Bloggers get busy, their interests change and life often takes over for a few months. If the information is available as an online resource, it may be possible to track when the last blog post was made. This will help authors to focus their efforts on active blogs rather than on potentially inactive ones.
Overall Recommendation – Buy This Book
This book is an invaluable companion to an author or book marketer. If you are looking to promote a book, this book will be an invaluable addition to your armory. Buy it and use it.
