The Importance of Book Reviews
When publishing a book, book reviews form a very important component in a book’s success. Including reviews adds value and credibility to your work in the publishing marketplace, especially when they are from well-respected people in your field. It also instigates your readers to write more consumer reviews, and sets the general tone for them to follow. Furthermore, reviews can often become the primary stimulant to prospective buyers for picking up your book and helps to separate your work from the multitude of other works in the platform, thereby giving it better recognition and attention.
To receive good reviews, there are a few basic things you need to keep in mind while submitting your book for review. If it is a work of fiction, it needs to have a continuous storyline that is sensible enough to be comprehensible to the readers, unique enough to stand amongst the scores of other titles, and compelling enough to keep your readers hooked on it. If it is a work of non-fiction, it must follow any one of the various professional rules of formatting and citation styles throughout its length, with a well-thought out usage of grammar and language. In both the case of fiction and non-fiction titles, genre-specific criteria must be kept in mind while writing your book, and proper proofreading should be undertaken to weed out any mistakes that were unknowingly left out.
Book reviews can be used and employed in a variety of situations and circumstances. You can put them on the back and front covers of your book to make it compelling for hard-copy buyers, while also using it in the designated webpage for your book in marketplaces it is listed in. Other than these, you can also use book reviews to gain marketing traction through social media posts and blogs, press releases, interviews and podcasts, and even author websites and information portals.
In self publishing, this strategy plays an equal role in book promotion as in a traditionally published book, as in the end, it is the book’s content and its credibility through reviews, that is going to help it sell.
From the Director’s desk
Navsangeet Kaur