How to Get Honest Reviews for Your Book

Apr 29, 2025

When you release your new book, one of the most important things you can do for it is start collecting reviews.

People are so much less likely to buy a book when it has a low review count.

Just consider your own behavior—if you see two similar looking products (books or otherwise) with the same 4.3 star rating, but one has 784 reviews and the other has 12, which are you more likely to buy?

The magic “100 reviews” number is especially important. It’s a bit of a psychological trigger for people that anything under 100 (i.e. double digits) isn’t a “real” book which will make them less likely to buy.

Unfortunately, as any author can attest—it is really difficult to get people to write reviews. Much more than you would think. People seem to think that a review has to be some sort of perfect essay so they delay doing it because it feels like too much work.

This is especially true if your readers have ADHD and think of writing a review as a boring task that they don’t actually want to do. 😅

It’s important to show your readers that a review doesn’t have to be complicated.

I have a page to help my readers at extrafocusbook.com/review to try and make it a bit less intimidating, but here’s the basic advice I tell people when asking then to write a review:

Don’t overthink it—just a few sentences is totally fine.
Unsure what to write? Use these as a prompt:
What did you like most about the book?
Who would you recommend the book to?

Here are a few specific strategies for helping you get your first 100 reviews:

Advance Reader Copies

Giving out Advance Reader Copies (or ARCs) is one of the most common ways of getting reviews in advance of an upcoming book. You give people an early free copy of your book and then they write a review and have it ready to post on your launch day.

While Amazon and other bookstores restrict doing any sort of “exchange-of-value” for a book review to discourage people trying to pay for reviews, it’s generally accepted practice to give someone a free copy of your book with the hope that they’ll give you a review.

A quick word of warning: many of your ARC readers won’t leave a review, and you likely won’t ever find out why. Don’t bother trying to chase them down or anything like that.

You can send one or two reminder emails to those that didn’t leave a review, but then leave it at that. Maybe they just didn’t love the book and don’t want to write a negative review? Maybe they got too busy and don’t want to admit they haven’t read it? Whatever the case, go in knowing that less than half of your ARC readers are likely to write a review for you.

How to find advanced readers:

Ask your list. Hopefully you’ve been putting in some work into building an email list that you can sell your book to! Many of them will be very interested in your book so it’s a great way to find advanced readers. You don’t have a list? This is your sign to start building your email list.
Ask your followers. If you’re on social media, put out the call for advanced readers there! Try to make it fun.
Ask your friends/family. Amazon does have sophisticated (and mysterious) algorithms that can sometimes detect and deny reviews from people it deems to be too close to the author, so this is actually kind of a last resort.

Email Sequences

If you’re selling your book through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or any other online retailer, you don’t get to know who has actually purchased your book. No name, email address, nothing.

This is partly why so many books these days (particularly non-fiction) will have downloadable bonuses. By offering a bonus in your book (usually in exchange for an email address), you are giving your reader a little treat but also getting a chance to know who your readers actually are and have a way to reach out to them.

When someone sends me a receipt to get the bonuses for Extra Focus, I put them in a non-aggressive email funnel that gives them the bonuses, asks them to share, and then ultimately attempts to get them to review the book.

(I try to make it helpful and not annoying so I’m offering value to my readers rather than slamming them with offers and upsells or anything like that.)

Here’s the basic 3-email formula I use as soon as people request the book bonuses:

(immediately): send a short email thanking them for reading the book with a link to download your book bonuses.
(1 week later): send a follow-up email that asks if they could share with friends or online, and includes the bonus download link again.
(2 weeks later): at this point it’s been 3 weeks since they’ve bought your book, and have hopefully read enough to be able to write a review. So in this email I ask them to share with me a star rating for the book. If they select 5 stars, I send them to a page that suggests writing a quick review.

I have this sequence automated with Kit, so it happens automatically without me needing to be involved in the process at all.

Paid subscribers to ADHD Writers can access to exact email sequence I use for Extra Focus to get more reviews from people that request the book bonuses: