Amazon vs Media Reviews

Media-Reviews

Part 1 of: How to Get Media Reviews

A newspaper article about the Harvard Business School paper’s conclusion regarding book reviewers reported in the Guardian:

“The Harvard report compared “professional” reviewers (e.g. those working for newspapers and magazines) with their new competition: the folk who leave reviews on Amazon. Though they limited themselves to Amazon reviewers, they could have cast their net much wider; these days the ivory towers of book reviewing are under attack by an army of humans, dispensing their reviews and their ratings across Amazon, Goodreads, LibraryThing, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and the whole glittering panoply of the social web.
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The conclusion of the Harvard academics was broadly this: that professionals are slightly more likely to review and approve of books written by writers who worked for the same titles as they, or books that had won prizes.  On the other hand, Amazon reviewers were rather more eclectic, and also in particular seemed to be more supportive of debut authors.
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It concluded: As the paper’s authors say, what is actually going on here is a secondhand audience bias: writers who write for the Guardian are more likely to write books that people who read the Guardian will like.  Similarly, a book that has won a prize has a badge of assumed quality; someone else has already done the filtering.  But this bias also sparks the immemorial cry of the debut author who doesn’t know anyone on the books desk: how on earth am I to get noticed?”
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Write for Magazines and Newspapers!
You might have noticed that I am a big preacher of writing  articles for magazines and newspapers.  One of the benefits – besides often being well-paid – is to “meet” your colleagues, or at least to be known by name and your writing, which is what the Harvard academics also found in their study.  Why Asking for (media) Book Reviews – when you could get both: book promotion and at the same time (often) being paid?  I know, it is a new concept to many writers, but when you think about it – it makes really sense: why use your time and effort to chase reviewers, when you can use your energy to leverage your books content and your research content – to create articles that you can pitch to both, print and online newspapers and magazines – and become known to the book reviewers?
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Why Books Don’t Get Reviewed by the NY Times.
In a Washington Post interview article some insights into the decisions of book review editors were revealed:

“We have such small space. . . . Every time we skip a book, we have to write up a reason. A couple of sentences saying that ‘you know what, [this is] an incredibly worthy book but I just assigned something very similar,’ or ‘this is rehashing arguments that we’ve seen,’ or some sort of justification.

“There are some authors who are pretty automatically review, because even if we don’t necessarily think, for example, the latest thriller by X Big Name is necessarily his best, we know that our readers are going to want to know that. So, it’s worthy of review not necessarily because of the quality — and I’m not speaking of David McCullough here, I think everything he writes pretty terrific — but we know that it’s going to be of interest. So we’ll assign a review and the review might not be positive, but it’s worthy of attention.
“There’s are a lot of factors that go into figuring out what books are going to be in an issue. The most obvious is pub date — the date of publication, because we’re a newspaper so it should be a relatively new book. But then we think about the mix in terms of fiction vs. nonfiction, all the genres within both of those categories. Within fiction you want to have, let’s say, science fiction, you might want to have a British novel, something in translation, include poetry. And then on nonfiction you want to have a mix of biography, foreign policy, science, hard science, mathematics. We’re kind of balancing in so many different ways.

On self-published books: We get them, and we don’t review them. We review about 1 percent of the books that come out in print from publishers every year. So 99 percent of those (published) books are being discarded. At some point you kind of have to say “okay, we’re just going to look at these books.”
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Well, they did!  According to several news articles, like this one by Forbes for example, proclaiming: “The New York Times, one of the most important source of book reviews, published a long and enthusiastic review of a self-published book, written by Alan Sepinwall, a famous TV critic.”  
Watch the full interview with these NYT book reviewers here.  http://www.c-span.org/video/?326362-1/tour-new-york-times-book-review

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Tips from a Publizist:
If you want mainstream reviews, make “the package” (industry speak for “the book”) as professional looking as possible. One rule of thumb is to use cream colored “stock” (industry speak for “paper”) because bright white stock signals short-run digital printing, in other words: self-published.

Make sure you begin your publicity and review outreach at least four months before your chosen on sale date.  Pamela Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, says that one way she chooses titles for review is by reading the starred reviews in the trades like PW, Kirkus, and Library Journal. Those trades will only consider books for review if they are received some four months in advance of the on sale date.

Manage to hide that your book is a self-pub by creating your own imprint with its own logo and a publisher name that’s not yours. List a couple of your friend’s books on your website, or books that you have written under a pen name.  Some outlets, like PW and Kirkus will try to force self-published authors into their paid review service, so be smart and let an “employee” of your book’s “publisher” make the contact. But never use a vanity company to set up your book!

Do lots of early reader giveaways.  You can run them for free on Goodreads and LibraryThing and lots of bloggers are open to covering your book in exchange for a few free copies to run contests for their readers. Start this at least 4 months prior to your book’s launch.

Read lots of more detailed tips in Part 2 of this series.

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