The joy of reviews.

Oh the joy of a good review for the Indie writer. I was fortunate enough to have The Review Blog read a copy of my historical novel, 'Tizzie' and then present me with this charming review. http://thereview2014.blogspot.co.nz/2015/04/louise-reviews-tizzie.html

Obviously I am pleased with such a thorough review but I wonder why so many so-called reviews do not discuss important aspects of a book such as the cover and formatting? And I won't go into the rants you can read littered all over GoodReads and even Librarything.
They reveal more about the person writing the review than the actual book. What can you make of a 'review' like the following:

'I hate this book. Don't read it. She's rude about vegans.'

or the review from the poor souls who one starred an Australian book because the writer had winter in June and everyone knows that June is summer.

Various people had a go at that reviewer and her pals, to no avail.

But we Indies need good reviews for without them we cannot get our books into the email book newsletters or persuade readers to read them. But how to obtain them?

Here is a list of suggestions gathered from other authors.
1
Put a plea at the end of your novel, in the back pages. Explain why you need reviews and ask nicely. Chances are anyone who finished your book liked it and will do so.
2
Look for reviewers who have reviewed books like yours. Try blogs and journals and readers' sites. Spend time researching the reviewer and write them a personal letter.
3
Use your mailing list. Offer a bribe in the form of free copies or something similar.
4
Use your social media but carefully. Don't wail or demand. Ask politely.
5
Search the blogs for blog reviewers. Send personalised requests, take time to speak to the bloggers.
6
Search for book reviewers on Twitter. Twitter has a good search engine and many reviewers. Search carefully. I tried this and ended up with a weird collection! Select your search words carefully.

Happy review hunting.

May I recommend that all Indies and those snooty people who keep saying the e-book is dead have a look at this? I really appreciate what the Author Earnings people do collating all this information for us so that we may know what is really happening in the Indie world.

http://authorearnings.com/
Welcome to the May 2015 Author Earnings Report. This is our sixth quarterly look at Amazon’s ebook sales, with data taken on over 200,000 bestselling ebooks. With each report over the past year and a half, we have come to see great consistency in our results, but there is always something new that surprises us. Often, it’s something we weren’t expecting, like the massive shadow industry of ISBN-less ebooks being sold, or the effect Kindle Unlimited has on title visibility. This time, we went into our report curious about one thing in particular. But we were still not prepared for what we found.

If you’ve been shopping for ebooks on Amazon lately, you may have seen this new addition to many ebook product pages:

http://authorearnings.com/report/may-2015-author-earnings-report/?utm_source=Author+Earnings+Updates&utm_campaign=86e4408164-May_2015_Author_Earnings_Report5_6_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2438cb1801-86e4408164-128100545