Gain Visibility with Reviews on Amazon.com

Book reviews on Amazon.com and other online bookstores are a great selling point for authors and publishers and they can be very helpful to consumers in selecting books to buy.

As I pointed out in my recent article, The Secret to Getting Great Book Reviews on Amazon, it's important to ask for reviews of your book and to make it easy for people to write reviews for you.

On the other hand, when you write reviews of related books and products on Amazon.com, you gain visibility for yourself with consumers and with the authors of the books you review. You can even post a video review on Amazon.com.

Be subtle about mentioning your own book when writing reviews of other books. You don't want it to sound like a sales pitch or detract from the book that you are writing about. For example, you can say "As a romance author myself, I really enjoyed the way that this author…". Or you can sign your name at the bottom of your review as "Jane Doe, author of …" You can also promote your brand or book in the "signature" that appears at the top of your review, as shown here:

Learn more about how to promote your book on Amazon in my ebook, How to Sell More Books on Amazon.

Comments

[Stephanie Draven]

Do you know how to embed a link in your Amazon signature line?

[Dana Lynn Smith]

Stephanie,
I don't believe you can create a clickable hyperlink, but you could list a website address or a shortened URL in the "signature" part of your Amazon profile or in the signature that you type at the end of your review. I think that Amazon frowns on this - I seem to recall a while back they were deleting reviews where people had linked to their own book. But you might experiment with it and see what happens. I do caution against being too promotional.
I hope that helps.
Dana

[DogTipper]

Thanks for this article; I was just wondering this week how to change my sig file on Amazon!!

[Carol White]

Dana

thanks for this great article - I think I know quite a bit about Amazon myself - but I had never thought about why they required you to have purchased something - now I know! Good point.

Carol White