Organizing Your Review and Publicity Campaign
All writers need reviews and publicity for their books. For well-known traditionally published authors, it's not necessarily difficult. Your publishing house publicity office will send out advanced reading copies (ARC) to well-known reviewers who will publish their reviews in well-known book review publications. Piece of cake.
For the rest of us, however, not so simple.
You could, of course, do as many not-so-well-known authors do and ask your family and friends to read your book and leave a review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and elsewhere. Or you could do what some authors have been accused of doing, namely buying up copies of their own book to jack up its sales rating, then leave five star reviews under false names.
I have never done either. Okay, I admit to being tempted to doing the latter, but I have never done it. No, really, I haven't.
When I published my first book, Duty, I really just stumbled through the process of getting it reviewed. I was a little more experienced in the effort when The Killing Depths, my second book, launched, but it was still a haphazard process.
By the time Empty Places, my third novel came out, I had it down to a science. I'd developed a system for not only getting reviews for my new releases, but publicity as well. And it's really quite simple.
Long before I release any new book, I create an Excel file for it. Within that Excel file I have separate spreadsheets, or tabs, for Reviewers, Interviewers, Reader Sites, Paid Advertising Sites, Press Releases, and so forth. Then I start my research.
While each Excel file will have the same tabs, the information in those tabs is often different for different books. For instance, Empty Places is a mystery thriller while my latest book, Eden, is a sci-fi novella. In the first instance, I had to find reviewers who read mystery thrillers; in the second, reviewers who read science fiction. Don't just ping the same people repeatedly. Start fresh with each book.
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