Writing Reviews

Writing Reviews

I’ve had a couple of the members of my ARC Team come back to me over the last week or so asking me to say what I would like them to write in their reviews of my books. Thank you, but it doesn’t work like that lol!

Amazon and the rest of the e-stores would skin me, and any other author (or for that matter any supplier of any product) if they thought I was telling people what to put in reviews of my books. It’s the sort of thing that would get my account cancelled….

Guidelines

So, I thought I’d jot down some general guidelines to help you along. These are all things you can put in a review.

1. Did you like the story?
2. Why did you (or not) like the story? The plot? The characters? The writing style? Whatever works for you on that is fine.
3. Sometimes a short quote is good if anything particularly made you sit up or gave you the flavour of the book.

What you don’t do, is retell the plot and spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it yet. In particular, don’t reveal cliff-hangers. It’s fine to say there is a cliff-hanger – some readers definitely don’t like them, so it’s fair warning for them. But don’t give details, such as what happens at the end of ‘The Virgin and the Masters’ Part Five.

Or it’s fine to say there’s an HEA, or to say that the HEA comes in a later book, but don’t write spoilers for other readers.

You don’t need to write an essay. A couple of sentences is fine, even a couple of words can be good so long as it gives a useful message to other readers.

For example ‘Great story.” tells other people a lot. Or “Hot read!” is good too. And it will take you less than a minute to write it.

One thing I will add, and this isn’t just for me, but on behalf of all authors everywhere:

Please, please, don’t write reviews on books for genres you don’t like. It’s not fair on the author. We are not all the same and an author of say, thrillers, can’t be expected to appeal to readers of, say romance. So, when I/we see reviews from readers saying things like….

…. it leaves us frothing at the mouth….

I had a review only a few days ago, on one of my titles which was clearly described as ‘A BDSM Ménage Erotic Romance’. Anyone over the age of 18 should have a very clear idea of the general content of the story. So when the review is One Star and begins….

…. I’ve got to say, it’s pretty irritating.

You might find this helpful – I don’t know the author concerned, but it’s a useful little article on the subject.

How To Write Book Reviews On Amazon

Hope all that helps…..

And thank you for your help.

Happy Reading 🙂

Simone xx