REVIEWER RESOURCES FOR INDIE AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS
When you are an Indie author, it can be hard to get reviews. The established traditional publishers, especially the large houses, have an in to get this done for you, and small to medium size publishers can do this as well. However, it takes some leg work to set up your own professional reviewing network. Here are some resources that will help you tackle this critical ingredient in getting your book out to the world at large.
Book Blogs – once the big thing for authors to nab reviews, book blogs are still productive, but as always, you must carefully choose bloggers whose focus, and readers, are relevant to your book* https://blog.reedsy.com/book-review-blogs/
Paid Reviews from Kirkus https://www.kirkusreviews.com/indie-reviews/ Caution: they charge several hundred per review, plus, no guarantee the review will be positive, and the entirety will be posted on their site, so one cannot use only a positive sounding snippet. But if you get a good review, it is from a highly respected source.
Fiction – reviews and marketing combined - for eBooks primarily
Today there are also very low cost (and free) options for getting eBooks to market yourself, and some include tools to get reviews. Look to KDP to both print your book, and to convert your print book to eBook format -- for Kindle only. There are also conversion apps (e.g. Sigil) that will allow you to convert the Kindle-only eBook format to ePub, which is used by all other eBook distributors, including iBook. If you choose Ingram/Spark for print, they will convert your print book to ePub format for a small fee.
Growing Market in the eBook world -- serialized fiction leads to both reviews and sales
Also, there are new services offering interactive tools to help you develop an audience, as you use readers’ input to create serialized books. How this works – you publish one chapter at a time, read comments and incorporate in next chapters. This helps you build a buying audience as you go, and gets reviews.
Check out http://Radishfiction.com, started in the UK. Their authors can earn substantial incomes, and serialized books are also being sold for TV and film development. Publishers Weekly also reported in 2017 there is money to be made by writing in this way, including, as radish reports, sales to film and TV. Radish looks for authors at KDP, also Wattpad, WeBook, WidBook. They are open to all, and provide a form on their site for writers who wish to sign on. Not exclusive to fiction. Check their site to find out other genres they are developing.
Final note on the eBook and cell phone reading phenomenon. Print is still selling, and in fact has not been replaced by these forms of book. What is intriguing is that worldwide there seems to be a growth, not surprisingly, of reading on cell phones, rather than e-readers or tablets. It should be noted that in China 306 million people in 2017 “read Chinese literature on their mobile phones,” according to the Beijing Municipal Committee. (http://medium.com/radish-fiction/fiction-on-your-phone-thats-novel-bf402e2e84b2)
In Japan authors are also writing books on cell phones. We should all keep an eye out to see what happens in the U.S. Medium.com reported that in 2017 60% of people who read stories at least some of the time read on cell phones. They, like radish, also reported hundreds of millions of people are now reading cell phones for serial fiction.
