Your best friend is readers who’ll review your book before it’s published
Once your book is in the same state as Matthew McConaughey’s — finished, and looking for fans — it’s time to get reviewers on board the rocket sled of release. BookFunnel is a more affordable solution for distributing review copies to people you don’t know well. It’s more professional to direct reviewers to BookFunnel’s link where your ebook awaits. At $10 a month, it’s well within an author-publisher’s reach.
The BookFunnel folks have a great YouTube lesson on how to conjure up reviews and keep after the requested reviewers. Lots of people will agree to review. It’s up to you, no matter whether you’ve got traditional publishing or not, to fuel up the rocket of reviewers. Get used to it.
When you’re publishing with a modest-sized or even micro-publisher, reviews mean a lot. Making a big push for reviews helps you ramp up a mailing list. You can judge the strength of publishers by the size of their email lists and how often they mail out to prospective readers. Traditional book deal? Great. A single email a month from your publisher, sent to a smattering of readers? Not as great to sell books. You can’t discount the good feeling a traditional contract gives you as an author. Working your way toward letting your books support you requires a great email list.
BookFunnel can be an engine for this outreach. There’s no better time to build fans than when you have a book you can share. Newsletters are entertaining, sure. Bonus material can be alluring, those cast-off parts of the book that were good and didn’t earn their keep inside your pages.
Ah, but the book, that’s the creamy nougat of your noggin. A free book in exchange for a fair review is the classic transaction in all sorts of publishing. Yes, you could attach a file to an email to deliver a review copy. Knowing how to do that better, with less friction for the reviewer, improves the odds of getting a review out of the exchange. More than once, the BookFunnel expert says your expectations need to be tempered.
Review editions are called an Advance Reader Copies. Watch the video so you can see some of the methods to build an ARC team from scratch. BookFunnel has a feature called certified mail and it can manage the security of ARC distribution, too.
