Having 15 Amazon Reviews is Worse Than Having No Book At All

It amazes me how people—smart, dedicated people who’ve spent a significant amount of time or money or both on their book—will allow their book to sit on Amazon with 15 reviews.

They live in today’s world. They use Amazon to purchase socks and protein bars. They know that before they decided to buy their Knit Cuffed Beanie Warm Winter Hats Unisex Skull Knit Cap Fashion Ski Hat or Wall Mounted Lamp, they considered other beanies and lamps.

They give Amazon more of their time, attention and money than they know they should.

They know that as their brains calculate prices and other details on the things they buy, there’s one factor overriding their ultimate decision: how many reviews the product has.

And yet they let their beloved books sit there with 15 reviews.

Why do they do that?

There’s one reason—or two.

One: they’re focused on the wrong thing. They think the number of books they sell matters. It doesn’t. I’d rather have 100 of my ideal readers read one of my books and have their lives transformed, and hire my company, than 10,000 people whose lives won’t be impacted at all. More people get rich from Lotto tickets than from book sales and publishing a book is a lot harder than buying a Lotto ticket. So why play those odds?

The star rating, when it comes to books, matters far less than the number of reviews. It’s not a blender that either works well or it doesn’t. We all know that different humans like different books and some humans are a-holes. And having variety in the ratings, as opposed to just a succession of a few five-star ones, actually looks far more authentic. Fifteen five-star ratings screams “I just asked 15 friends to review this.”

This is a numbers game. And reviews stay on Amazon, literally, forever. (I’ve heard of people trying to get purposely sabotaging reviews removed and it’s impossible.) Yes, you’re missing the opportunity of having FREE PUBLICITY FOREVER.

There’s a frame store I go to that gives you 20% off some rather pricey frames if you’ll do a Yelp review. They don’t do it because they like giving hundreds of dollars in discounts but because reviews are crucial for every business today. Like it or not, as an author, you are a business.

Of course, we can’t give readers 20% off our books in exchange for a review. So we ask our friends or followers—sometimes several times.

Here’s what happens: our friends or followers say, “Oh yeah, I’ll do it,” and they don’t.

So we post or send out emails stressing how important reviews are to us, and maybe a few reviews trickle in.

We start to feel desperate and lame. None of us like asking for help. So we abandon the project and the book that we loved so deeply into existence sits there with 15 reviews.

But there is, as the recovery saying goes, an easier and softer way. At my company, we gather what we call Review Squads made up of the client’s friends and followers. We also have an Internal Review Squad that we put on the case. And then we nudge them. Because we know they need nudging—from someone who’s not the author.

Here’s the thing: they mean to review your book. They have every intention of doing it. But then their kid comes home crying or the chicken burns or the dishwasher breaks and logging onto Amazon to review a book they probably haven’t finished reading is the last thing on earth they want to do.

I beg you to forge ahead anyway. The first way you can do that is to tell people they don’t need to finish—or even read—your book to review. While I appear to be advocating for dishonesty and in fact I guess I am, it’s really just making it easy for someone to support you by asking them to do something that will take five minutes and not five hours. You can even tell them they don’t need to buy the book since Amazon allows people who haven’t purchased a book to review it.

While a review written by someone who hasn’t purchased the book is considered “unverified,” it still sits there. You can also price your ebook at 99 cents when you’re doing a push for reviews so that your people can both purchase the book for less than, well, anything today but a few Tootsie Rolls at the newsstand. Amazon allows you to change the cost of your book so you can just switch it back after your reviews come in.

Why? Because studies show that nothing makes people feel better than being of service. Writing a review for an author is an act of service, especially when it’s a person who doesn’t have the 10,000 reviews of someone like Tim Ferriss or Glennon Doyle.

I can’t bear your hard work being dismissed because of those 15 measly reviews.