← The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
How To Get More Book Reviews With Joe Walters
01:05:10
Are you struggling to get reviews for your book? Wondering how to navigate the different types of reviews, from customer feedback to professional blurbs? Joe Walters from IndependentBookReview.com gives his tips. In the intro,
Loading summary
Transcript43 lines
- [00:01]
Joanna Penn
Welcome to the Creative Pen Podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, craft and creative business. You can find the episode, show notes, your free author blueprint and lots more@thecreativepenn.com and that's Pen with a double N. And here's the show. Hello creatives. I'm Joanna Penn and this is episode 819 of the podcast. And it is Friday 11th of July, 2025, as I record this during another heat wave here in the uk. In today's show, I'm talking to Jo Walters about how to get more book reviews. It is a super useful and actionable discussion and we talk about the three different types of book reviews, how to get them and how to use them, what kinds of reviews are okay to pay and which ones are definitely not okay, and how to handle negative reviews. So that's coming up in the interview section. So in writing and publishing things, something that has been dominating headlines certainly here in the uk. Not sure about the rest of the world, but it's been pretty big here, the controversy surrounding Raina Win's best selling memoir, the Salt Path. So the observer newspaper published an investigation headlined the Real Salt How a Blockbuster Book and Film were Spun from Lies, Deceit and Desperation. And this has now spurned lots more articles and it challenges key elements of the supposedly true story about losing their home and walking the southwest coast path. And yeah, I mean, I've read it. I thought it was wonderful. It still is a wonderful book. You can, you can like a book for its story and its writing and then find out things about it and wonder what's going on. So the article reveals their real names, Sally and Tim Walker instead of Rainer and Moth Win, and alleges that Sally was arrested after being accused of stealing tens of thousands of pounds from her employer, then borrowing money to pay it back. And then that loan got called in, leaving them homeless. Now the book opens with them being homeless and in the book it's made out as if that happens because of trusting a friend with a bad investment. So this I think is quite key because it's a very different vibe to the sort of sympathetic stance where we feel the book starts. Medical experts are also questioning her husband's claimed diagnosis and recovery. And all of that is in the articles which I'll link in the show notes, which Raina Wynn has called the allegations highly misleading and has posted an article on her website. She's also taking legal advice, but I don't want to talk about the truth of it, what I've said, is reported by mainstream newspapers, but it's clear that there are elements which may not be true in the sense of the book. So what feels true to the spirit of the book is what a lot of people feel betrayed by. And this issue of trust in memoir is what I wanted to talk about today. What is truth in memoir? How much dramatic license is acceptable? And I've had lots of people on this show over the years talking about memoir. But essentially, writing memoir, there's always a discussion of truth. Now, factual truth is objective, verifiable. There's external evidence, it is dates, it is documented events and bank statements and court records and things that can be verified. Emotional truth is subjective. It's feelings and experiences from somebody's point of view. It's the lens of memory, which of course, is never factually true. And also, a memoir is about forming a empathetic connection to a writer. Gore Vidal said, a memoir is how one remembers one's own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts, double checked. And most of the writing advice on memoir is to prioritize the emotional truth over the factual truth. So this is so interesting. And of course, there have been other memoirs that have hit this before. James Frey's A Million Little Pieces is the famous one, but there's lots of them. But the issue with the salt puff, perhaps is more around what is left out, which to me is this sort of backstory that changes the place where it starts. Other people are questioning the nature recovery side of it, but the truth of that is, you know, his story is not the one told. To be honest, it's. It's her story. And I was thinking about this like, are we as writers, are we unconsciously or even consciously shaping our stories to fit narrative arcs that readers expect? Do we want a more dramatic story arc? An article in the Guardian has considered this around how do we stop fake memoirs from being published? And it says, if a narrative arc seems too neat and tidy to be true, perhaps it's worth considering why, and employing a freelance fact checker to investigate. But they say the trouble is, neat and tidy narrative arcs are often exactly what many readers and viewers of film adaptations want. And of course, publishers. Penguin Random House in this case, clearly makes a lot of money from this memoir and the other of her books. And also the Guardian article says publishers do not face serious material repercussions for lies told in memoirs. Reputational damage, meanwhile, is usually put on the author. And this is what it feels like in this Case, I don't think. I mean, you're going to sue the publisher and get the price of a book back. That's not really the point. It's more a feeling of betrayal from the reader. The article says authors can get around this by writing autobiographical fiction, autofiction rather than memoir. Books like Carrie Fisher's Postcards from the Edge or the Booker Winning Auto Fiction, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart, they don't come under fire for being made up because we all know that's what fiction is. But the article really says, in the end, it comes down to marketing. Auto fiction isn't an established a genre as memoir, so marketing teams face discrete challenges. A true story has historically proved easier to build a campaign around. There is money to be made with very few legal repercussions by telling the most marketable version of a story rather than the true one. So I find this really hard. I'm finding this difficult and I thought I would talk about it because when we feel this is a difficult problem, I think it's good to acknowledge in the writing community that this narrative arc is certainly what we are told to focus on if you are considering writing memoir. And obviously I've written one memoir, travel memoir, Pilgrimage, and I knew it wasn't finished until I had finished a narrative arc. And if you've read the book, you will see mine. It's certainly not as dramatic as the one in the Salt Path, and it's not dramatic at all, really, I suppose, but it's true. So, yeah, it feels like we're meant to have a bigger, the biggest shift possible. And I think the memoir industry and editors and again, interviews I've had on this show and perhaps even my own recommendation is to have a proper arc. Now, the Salt Path is a mega blockbuster. It's sold several million copies. There's a new film out right now starring Gillian Anderson. It only came out like a week or two ago, which I think is why this observer article has come out now, because without being such a blockbuster, it would never have been investigated. And like Cheryl Strayed's Wild, which again, massive blockbuster memoir, it has a clear arc, this sort of devastating loss, a health crisis. It's a life or death health crisis. Homelessness, this epic journey, and then finding health, finding home, finding life again. It is a perfect arc. And maybe that is the problem. So, yeah, things to keep in mind. I was thinking about how to frame this in terms of what we can do, because in my mind, truth is important, both factual truth and emotional truth. Memory is of Course, unreliable. We can never say this is entirely true, but there's a difference between the subjectivity of memory and maybe not, and changing things deliberately to make a more saleable story. So how do we write authentic memoir? I think fact checking as much as possible is a good idea. And keeping evidence, if necessary, triangulating your experience with others if it's appropriate. Although having talked to other memoir writers on this show, when it's a family situation, for example, how does this affect your parents or your siblings, It. It is still your story. So that is important too, being honest about your process. And if you have compressed a timeline or combined characters, then maybe say so in an author's note. The transparency, I think, is important. And if you put it in an author's note, then it's not that big a deal. I guess, then I think probably the biggest thing is really resisting the pressure to try and construct a narrative arc. And if there isn't one, there, perhaps focusing on the emotional truth, but perhaps not to the detriment of something that might give the wrong impression. But again, very, very hard questioning, am I writing this story to genuinely share my experience, or do I want to make it more saleable? I think if you pitch it to a publisher, they're going to want to make it more salable. So, yeah, in coming to an end on this, I feel that memoir is an act of trust. I certainly was terrified to put Pilgrimage out there, my own memoir, but not because it wasn't true. I was terrified because it was true, because the emotional truth of that book, and also in many aspects, writing the Shadow, which has a lot of elements of memoirs, I was sharing things that made me feel vulnerable. And when somebody reads something vulnerable, they feel connected to you. And I feel that this is what is going on with the reactions to the Salt Path, is that people love Raina Wynne and they feel very close to her. And when you shatter that trust by something that, again, allegedly may or may not be true, read the observer article and her own rebuttal, it leads to this sense of betrayal. So there is absolutely nothing wrong with crafting a story to sell. But the question is, when is the line crossed into this auto fiction? When is it truly memoir? And only you can really think about that for your own writing. But when you look at this example, and I guess James Frey's example, although James Frey's book's still selling, so, you know, you have to decide where you want to end up on this. I would love to know what you think. Let me know. You can Leave a comment on the show notes or you can email me joannathecreativepen.com Are you a memoir writer? Where do you think the line is crossed? Or I guess, are you a reader? Because I feel like it's the readers who are feeling strongest about this. I think probably a lot of writers might understand why you would start a story in that way. So yeah, interesting. So in personal news and very much fiction, I finished the Black Church short story and that is now with Kristen, my editor. And I also wrote the foreword to the short story collection the Buried and the Drowned. It's my first short story collection. Every, every short story has an author's note, by the way. And in the author's note I share the true elements behind the story. But all the stories are fiction. But I've never written a forward to a short story collection. So that was a new writing experience for me. It was really hard to be fair and it's quite short. But it's a more positioning statement on the themes that go across the whole collection and why some of the, I guess the, the deeper things that come up in my writing come up over and over again. So yeah, very interesting to write that. That's going to go to Kristen after the whole thing is done. I, I also have ordered them. So essentially I started a new scrivener project and I put in all the stories, all the author's notes, and then I've been moving them around kind of feeling. Feeling is all I can go on really is how they should be structured because the earliest stories were written a decade ago and I don't write many short stories to be fair, like just I guess a couple a year, one or two a year really for a decade. I'm not massively prolific at short stories, so yes, that was a challenge to write. I've also been building out the Kickstarter campaign with character images which I've generated in midjourney, which I love doing. It is so much fun, sort of in my mind what these characters look like and then creating the character images and now you can just generate a video with one click. So making the character images and then animating them, they will all be part of the marketing. And the pre launch page is up@jfpen.com buried I will be doing a webinar on writing short stories which will be part of the Kickstarter and also some consulting. I will talk about how to write short stories but also the options for publishing and marketing because they do represent quite a challenge, that is for sure. But I also find them a very satisfying form to write. So yeah, that is what I've been doing this week. I guess I should also say that I had a goal this year, so I always have health goals and one of my goals was to do this Double Ultra, the Race to the Stones. And as I record this right now, I have pulled out of that and I wanted to mention it because I am. I'm feeling quite disappointed with myself and down. The reason being is that it is a heat wave here in the UK and the walk, which was 50k and then rest and then another 50k. So Saturday and then Sunday it's on the Ridgeway, which is a, I guess it's by the name of it, the Ridgeway. You can guess that it is a ridge and there is very little shade. And so I have not trained in to walk 50k and then another 50k in over 30 degree heat. And I just don't feel confident that I can do it. I don't think it is healthily a good thing to do. So I feel quite disappointed in myself. But also I wanted to share it because so often we do make goals and plans and then things happen and we make decisions to change those plans and that's okay. And that can happen with our writing as well. I get emails from people sometimes and they say, oh, you know, I said I would finish this book and I didn't. And I feel guilty and disappointed and all this stuff. And it's like, okay, well that's all right, you can just start again and aim for the next goal. And so that's what I'm doing. My next goal is the. If you've been listening for a while, you might remember that I did a powerlifting competition last September and now I'm in my 50th year, I get to be in the second Masters level and in my age group. And of course the older you get, the less competition there is. So my next goal is that in September. So it's only, you know, less than two months away or two months away. So I'm back. I have been training for long distance walking and now I'm back training for powerlifting. So that I have been powerlifting all through the time, but now I'm training to get my lifts up to the highest weight in time for that. So I wanted to share it because on the one hand I'm just. I'm disappointed. On the other hand I am relieved because it would not be a fun weekend in this heat wave. British people don't do well in heat waves. And you probably know we just don't really do air conditioning over here. So yeah, but I hope that encourages you. If there is a goal you have that you've had to reset, then such is life and let us move on. So thanks for your emails and comments and photos this week, Saskia said on the interview with Ines. Thank you for yet another brilliant episode. So often I find myself listening and up pops help and information I didn't even know I needed. Love the inspirational talk from Ines and also grateful for the tip off about Rebecca Symes, Quick Cast and Ryan Holiday's article. So grateful. Thanks Saskia. Mary said. I truly love the interview with Betsy Lerner and I loved her book, which I picked up at a local event. I saw in the book how her background in poetry still carried her along, even though it was subtly hidden. There was nothing pretentious or overly wordy in her writing. I continually underlined sentences that I wish I'd written, but they were all hers. Oh, I love that. That's really great. Thank you for the podcast. And finally, Mariah said on the interview with Jules on Audio this episode gave me a great idea. Jules's advice was to read my stories out loud, but I don't have the natural excitement in my reading voice, so it wasn't giving me anything. Instead, I put it through 11 reader and had it read out aloud. It was amazing. It made me cry. Not just because I got to hear my stories read aloud, but because it showed me that they're actually kind of good. So much fun. Oh, I'm really glad that helped Mariah. And yes, listening to different voices Voices read your work can be very cool and you can just upload like a PDF onto 11 reader, so lots of fun there. Okay, so please leave a comment on the podcast show notes@wcreativepenn.com or on the YouTube channel or email me. Send me pictures of where you're listening. JoannaTheCreativePenn.com I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation. So this episode is sponsored by prowritingaid because however you choose to publish, whether you go indie or you want a traditional deal, you need to make your book the best it can be. ProWritingAid is one of my absolute must use tools in my writing process. And yes, I did just use it again on my short story collection this week. And in fact one of the reasons why is because some of my stories have been written in US English and others have been UK English and we decided to move everything into UK English. So it was really good to use ProWritingAid to do that. And also as I went through, I was fixing up some other issues too. So once I finish a first draft of a new story, I use ProWritingAid before printing and hand editing. Then I use it again before sending to Kristen, my editor. I use it with Scrivener, but you can also use it with other software or just online on your browser. ProWritingAid knows all the rules of editing and helps you apply them. And of course you don't have to use the changes if you don't want to. It helps with making your writing more active, finding repeated words, finding words and sentences you could improve, adding sensory detail, your sentence structure, grammar and punctuation issues, as well as typos, spacing and more. It also now has a manuscript analysis developmental editing tool and a beta reader report so you can get an analysis of your whole manuscript. I've tried both of these and they are super useful. So why use software to help you? Why don't you just learn all the grammar and writing rules and apply them yourself? Well, we all use tools to improve our process and we're also often blind to our writing issues. It helps to have another pair of eyes, even if the eyes are software. So won't an editor do all this? Well, yes they do, but I'd rather pay my editor to fix the things that the software can't. So I use prowritingaid as my essential editing tool before sending to my human editor. Check out the free edition or get 15% off the premium edition by using my link. Prowritingaid.com Joanna J-O-A-N N A that's prowritingaid.com Joanna so this type of corporate sponsorship pays for the hosting, transcription and editing, but my time in creating the show is sponsored by my community@patreon.com thecreativepenn thanks to the two new patrons who've joined in the last week, and thanks to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. And I appreciate everyone who pops in for a month or two and then pops out again. Every little helps. If you join the community, you get access to all my backlist videos and audio covering writing, craft, author business and tutorials and demos on AI tools. This week I shared my tips on AI assisted translation, the tools and companies I used for that, and how to adapt covers with AI tools on Canva. If you already have a cover, the Patreon is a monthly subscription, the equivalent of buying me a black coffee a month or a couple of coffees if you're feeling generous. So if you get value from the show and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon.com P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com TheCreativePen Right, let's get into the interview. Jo Walters is the author of the Truth About Book Reviews, an insider's guide to getting and using reviews to grow your readership, and also runs independentbook review.com which focuses on reviewing indie books. So welcome to the show, Joe.
- [23:57]
Jo Walters
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
- [23:59]
Joanna Penn
Oh, it's good to have you on. So, first up, tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.
- [24:06]
Jo Walters
Yeah. So I started writing back in college, fell in love with it with Ray Bradbury, and wanted to be a high school English teacher. But I learned pretty quickly that high school English teaching was a lot of work when I came home and not the same as discussing books in college. So I decided to become, like, a volunteer reader for a literary magazine called Indianola Review. We were print and digital, and so I would read short stories and with a team, would vote on if certain short stories would be published or not. And I absolutely loved that. I moved away from teaching and became a server so that I could have more time to read and write. And I was serving when I found a job in Oregon for the marketing director at a small press called Inkwater Press. And somehow, by a miracle, I got that job, and I had to figure out what book marketing was. And so I read your book.
- [24:58]
Joanna Penn
We're all trying to do that.
- [24:59]
Jo Walters
Oh, man, it's a long game. And so I read your book and read so many other books about how to do it and kind of just got my feet wet, figured out how to market books, how to sell books, how to get authors who I knew cared about their writing because I care about my writing to get read by more people. And then I had to move from Portland, Oregon, and come back home in Pennsylvania. But I didn't want to stop being in publishing, so I started Independent Book Review. I knew that indie authors needed a platform for book reviews, and I knew I could do a good job with it. And so I started building that and worked freelance for two other indie presses, Paper Raven Books and then Sunbury Press. And I was targeting book reviews for them. I was doing metadata, book descriptions, author bios, anything you could think of for book marketing. I was doing it for those presses while building Independent Book Review. And then a couple years ago, Independent Book Review became my Full time job, so every day editing reviews and promoting reviews and it's truly the best job I've ever had.
- [26:01]
Joanna Penn
I love that, I love that you have loved books and stories so much, that you've dedicated so much time to it. But why indie books then? Because you obviously worked in the more traditional side as well and you come from literature at university and all that. So why did you think indie books?
- [26:21]
Jo Walters
What? I just knew how much they needed it. It has nothing to do with quality, why they're not getting picked up by major review companies or major blurbers, anything like that. Their books are still great, they still get editing, they still get great cover design, but they don't have big teams behind them pushing books. They don't have a bunch of money pushing books. And I knew how, how much I could just at least be another voice for them. Indy, really, it means all of the authors that you know down the street, your friends, it's very rarely are you friends with Stephen King. And so it's just really, I'm trying to help the little guy who loves writing and loves books and just wants to get his work out there. And so yeah, so I, I'm all indie all the time, that's for sure. Except for my leisure reading. Sometimes I, I dabble elsewhere.
- [27:16]
Joanna Penn
Oh yeah, I know, we all read around it. I mean, nobody, when you're a big reader like we are, I mean you hardly ever look at the publisher, right? It's not like we go shopping by publisher. But you're right in terms, yeah. In terms of, of who reviews stuff and then your own book. So what kind of writing have you done then? And then tell us why you wanted to do this book.
- [27:38]
Jo Walters
Yeah, so I've always been a fiction writer. I've been writing short stories for a long time. I worked, I'm still working on a novel for 10 years and it's not there yet. I wanted to finish that book before I got my book review book out, but then I just, I had to get the book review book out. I couldn't wait on my little 10 year old protagonist anymore and I had to make sure I jumped in and offered my expertise for the indie community, for book reviews mostly because, I mean, when I was working for presses, I just got the question a lot. How do you get book reviews? How do you get certain types of book reviews? So big media blogs, podcast interviews, how do you get customer reviews? I just got all of these questions all the time and so I wanted to create a resource for all of those authors and I enjoy writing about it too. I've been writing blogs for years, book marketing blogs for years. And I always thought that was my best chance of making jokes. And so I just filled my book with jokes, filled my book with as much experience as I've had, as much knowledge as I have. And to just put them all in one place, you're going to get specific platforms to try pitching, you're going to have book review resources in my book. So to just try to gather all of the things in one place instead of authors and presses just searching forever to try to figure out what works, I just tried to compress everything I know into one document. Now I got it with the Truth About Book Reviews.
- [29:10]
Joanna Penn
So yeah, and it is super useful. We are going to come to the content of the book in a minute. But given that this was, I guess your first self publishing experience, then how did that go? Did you learn anything that made you kind of understand why being in India is difficult?
- [29:26]
Jo Walters
Oh, too many things. First of all, the timeline, the hope I had for finishing a book in like three months definitely got sidetracked with the amount of things that I have to do for independent book review. And just in my everyday life, three months was impossible. So initially I said, oh, this book's gonna be out in January and here we are with a July 10th release date and I'm still sprinting, so that is difficult. And also I tried to upload my ebook for KDP pre order about 2 weeks ago with a different subtitle and they shut me down four to five different times before I had to change my subtitle. I was even I told my wife I I'm not changing the subtitle. I just, I like it too much. I'm not keyword farming or anything. I'm not cheating. My book is about books. But they said so the subtitle was originally an insider's guide to getting book reviews and using them to market your book. Pretty straightforward I think. But you can't have book too many times in the title and subtitle and I had it three so I cut one out. I said getting reviews and using them to market your book. And they didn't even like that. So I had to get rid of it. There are no books in the subtitle now, but at least it's up for pre order.
- [30:45]
Joanna Penn
So yeah, this is so interesting. And this will go out I think once it is actually out. But it is interesting. I with my very first book I also put up it was something this was in the early days when there was only really Amazon in terms of self publishing. And I had something like from idea to Amazon as a subtitle. And they shut that down because of course I used to their own company name. And so I understood that. But the word book does seem a little extreme, especially when it's about book reviews. But this is the point. I mean, there are all of these things that are difficult to do. But let's get into the content of the book. It is super useful. So authors do obviously talk about book reviews as if they're one thing, but they're not all one thing. So what are the different types of book reviews and where can they be used?
- [31:35]
Jo Walters
Yeah, so I separate them into three different types of reviews. I've seen other marketers separate them into four. Let's stick with three for now. So my first one in my timeline for what I recommend is blurbs or editorial reviews. So basically those are like testimonials for your book for your business. You ask authors or experts in your niche to read an early copy of your book and provide a few sentences of praise for it so that you can use it on your marketing material. So that would be putting it on your book cover, for example, if you get a big notable name, you put J.F. penn right on the front cover. Then bam. That's helping helping other readers. Browsers see that this could be a book for them. And then you can also put it on your. On the Amazon page itself in the editorial review section through Amazon Author central. Or you can do it with Amazon a content which is graphics on your amaz Amazon page. I love those. And then you can also use it on things like your website on social media graphics. One of my favorite things to do is to use it in future pitches. So if I reach out to a different review platform and I have a blurb from a notable company who said this book was incredible and gave it a starred review, then that really works wonders for helping that recipient think maybe this book is already quality gate gatekept in a way that indie authors aren't always quality gatekept. It's a way for readers to see like, okay, somebody read this book and somebody said it was good. So those would be blurbs or editorial reviews. That's one. The second type of review I consider media or trade reviews. Media reviews to me, are any reviews in the media? I'm gonna count social media because it has it in the name. I think as long as you're getting publicity for it, that is a media review. You can get it on social media. You can get. Podcasts aren't always necessarily a review, but it's media. And then trade reviews are from trade review publications. Publications that focus only on books as opposed to a bigger media or something that says people that focus on culture and fashion and all sorts of cool stuff in addition to books. And you can use those in different ways too, the first of which is publicity. Share that link with your audience and then you can put it in on your websites as well, just like blurbs. You can just, just pull a quote from your larger review and use it just like blurbs with newsletters, websites, social media, and you can put it in like distributor backends too. If you use PublishDrive or IngramSpark, you can add editorial reviews, blurbs, media reviews in there. And then the third type of review is the most common and probably the most difficult customer reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, you don't use those ones as much, but you are putting those reviews, you're getting those reviews for your product page. So every browser that comes sees that you have 150 reviews and can scroll through them and find out what everyday people are saying about it. And so that is a totally different strategy than the strategy that you would use for media reviews.
- [34:50]
Joanna Penn
That is a great overview and it's interesting because I've certainly always focused more on customer reviews than anything else because they help the algorithms, they help the social proof, and they help with advertising because it's very hard to advertise a book with no reviews on. But the comments I get from authors now are, oh, well, it's all right for you. You've got xx number of reviews. And I'm like, yeah, we all start somewhere. So if someone listening is like, okay, I want it. I need to get customer reviews on say, Amazon or Goodreads. What are some tips for getting those customer reviews for new authors with new books who might not have an ARC review team?
- [35:28]
Jo Walters
Yeah, everybody does start somewhere. It is difficult and time consuming most of all. So much in publishing is you're either paying for it with your dollars or your time. And with customer reviews, so much of it is your time, but you can use it without an email list. I would recommend probably getting started on an email list one of these days. But it's okay to take your time. There's so many things to focus on before publication. My favorite way to do customer reviews is using comp titles. Even if you wrote the most unique book that you've ever read, other people have written unique books. You know you should have been. You either should have been reading other books similar to yours while you're writing it or before you're writing it. But you can check them out now for the bestseller pages on Amazon. You can find books that are similar to yours and then find out where those things have been reviewed. Those books have been reviewed. If you're looking for customer reviews, head over to their Amazon page and see if they've been published in the last 10 to 15 years. You don't want to go too deep and you probably don't want to pick books that have a thousand plus reviews. But maybe in the in between 100 to 500 reviews, you can scroll down to those customer reviews and check out if those reviewers have profiles. If they have profiles, they might share public social media accounts or websites and they like to be pitched for free reviews. So that's definitely one of the best ways that I've found to get new customer reviews. But you can also do the same thing with like smaller blogs. Smaller blogs really can turn into customer reviews pretty often because if you find through comp titles, if you search a book just like yours and you Google it, or you ask ChatGPT to find where they've been reviewed and you pay attention to the lesser known ones, then you can go ahead and give yourself a pretty good shot of pitching for a customer review from those places, asking for the blog review first and see if it can convert into a customer review. But then there's also things like so you can build a launch team. I know if you are just starting out, you might not have a big list of supporters who you know will be reading your book, but you can definitely still build a launch team with your personal connections. Anybody who you've worked in a writing workshop or something in the past, anybody who is not your mom or your uncle, you can still. You can, as long as they're not Facebook friends with you. So they shouldn't be like really close people to you or anything. But you can build launch teams by recognizing who you've interacted with in the past and who might want to support you and ask them to read an early copy so that they can help out in that first week of publication. I know I did that with my newsletter a lot. I build a launch team through my newsletter by just creating a form for people to sign up and putting it in my automation sequence. And I ended up getting 20 plus people to review, to offer to review the book. And so there are options. They're all going to take time. You can ask People inside the book itself with a link to review the book at the very end, right before the back matter, directly after the end page, you can ask for a review. You can put a link there when you get the review link. And then you can also try like paid resources. Like, you can't pay for customer reviews, but you can pay places like Pubby, where you can read books, read other author, indie author books, and get your book reviewed in return. It's not an exact swap. They work around it in that way. Then you can try like things like book funnel, story origin to try to disseminate your book. And then they send review requests after they've downloaded the book after a certain amount of time. Same with Netgalley. Pubnook is another one like Pubby. There are options. It's just about time.
- [39:36]
Joanna Penn
Yeah. And this is so important. So you did say it there, but just to emphasize, you cannot offer something in exchange for a review. So when we're offering our book to people, we're saying, here's my book. I always just say if you like it and would like to leave a review. Review. I'd really appreciate that. I mean, even our ARC lists, we can't say, here's a free book in exchange for a review. It has to be somebody's free choice to do a review. And as you said, you can't pay someone to do a review. I mean, there are lots of these services, but that's not, that's not allowed. So it's as you say, there are ways around it. But we have to be clear. Like if I send out an email to my review list, my ark team, maybe, I don't know, one out of three or sometimes one in two, I guess, will actually leave a review within the sort of period. So even people who've signed up to say they will do a review. So I guess what I'm saying is don't get annoyed with people if they don't. You know, everyone has things on their to do list, haven't they? So we do have to be careful about how we're asking for these things.
- [40:42]
Jo Walters
Yeah, I said it multiple times in my book. Really don't get annoyed at these people. They're offering to read your book. That is the best part. And so if they leave it, that is super helpful. But if they go and disappear, that's okay too.
- [40:56]
Joanna Penn
Yeah, don't, don't chase people and being annoying. These lovely book bloggers who do all this stuff basically for the love of it, and they, they just get so many pictures. So yeah, it's one of those sort of frustrating areas, but also really important. So let's just, then for people, let's say, like me. So when I was a new author, I did make a lot more effort and there will be authors listening who have an email. They have a lot of books. And when. The more backlist you have, the more difficult it is to try and tell people which book you need reviews on. So. So what can we do to get consistent reviews over years, especially on backlist books? Because basically you need to get reviews regularly in order to keep things sort of moving.
- [41:38]
Jo Walters
Yeah, this is. It's a good problem to have really, but you do still have to stay on top of it even though you have less time to pitch one on one. My favorite way is, the easiest way is to make sure that there's a page at the end of the book to include an actual clickable link. How I like to do that is create like a redirection link for before your book is available. My redirection link is independentbookreview.com reviewlink. So I just use that through WordPress. And right now the ebook is not published. So if I were to redirect that link to my ebook review page, it would just be dead. You wouldn't be able to click it. Well, you'd be able to click it, but it'd take you nowhere. And so right now, pre publication, it's taking you to a Goodreads review page, which you can have beforehand. But once the book gets published, you go over to the redirect, you change the link and then you don't have to edit the ebook or anything. All you have to do, all the person has to do is click that link. When the book is already out, it will have changed, you should have changed it to the ebook review link. And so you don't have to edit anything, it's just automatically clickable. They can do it on their devices. So that's one of my favorite ways to do it for sure. And you don't have to do any work after that. As long as people are reading your book, then they have access to that review request. I also like automation sequences in emails. So you can set up a, a special signup page for those who read your book. Say you have a specific link that you put them, you send them to in your bio or in the front matter, if you wanted to do that. And so they sign up via. Via a specific form that separates it in your email company, whichever one you're using. And you can have whoever Signed up for that 30 days after, for example, you already know that these are the people who came from your book. Then there's a review request that automated automatically goes out. An automation sequence that just goes out. You don't have to do it every time. So I like automation sequences and emails for sure. And then make it easy to find on your website for those who all you need is contact. Really. Contact for review copies is very simple. Have an email if you want, have a contact box if you want. You can also have a Google form or a JOT form for people to click in and say, you want to join my ARC team? Click here. They sign up, they put their information in, and you will already have somebody to send it out to the next time your book comes out. So those are really easy and those are probably my favorite. High five is one that you can do if you sell direct through your website or through, like if you're fulfilling orders through Amazon. I don't really focus too much on that because most authors aren't doing that. But that sends out automated review requests. High five. And that's an Amazon company, so you could try things like that.
- [44:42]
Joanna Penn
Yeah, I like those. Good, good tips there. So let's come to the blurbs or the editorial reviews, because this has very much been a sort of traditionally published thing and they have to get book blurbs, quotes from other authors and indies have never done this as much. And it was interesting that earlier in the year there was a Simon and Schuster article in the Guardian here in the uk and it basically said expecting authors, agents and editors to secure blurbs can create an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent. And I thought that was interesting because it seems to suggest that there's a sort of move against these kinds of blurbs and editorial reviews. So what are your thoughts on when are these useful and how can we get them in an authentic way rather than just always pitching famous names?
- [45:38]
Jo Walters
Yeah, I. I love that article.
- [45:41]
Joanna Penn
Yeah, me too.
- [45:42]
Jo Walters
Oh, it's. Somebody said it finally. I feel like it's so true. So rewarding. Connections over talent. Blurbs are connections and sometimes so. Stephen King is one of the most prolific blurbers I know. I don't know if he reads all those books. I would love to ask him, but I just don't know. It's about putting their name on your marketing. If they get to put their name on your popular book cover, that's positive for them. The thing that I step in with is that most readers, I would say don't really understand the connections part of it. In the same way that literary inside circle people do. I know this. Other writers know this, Authors know this. That some of these blurbs, it means that maybe they share an agent with the that author or have the same indie press. But I it's still about needing more content and blurbs being content. You can't be the one who calls your book spectacular. So put somebody else's name on there is beneficial. You can use it in your description, but you can also just use it on your marketing material. And connections are good too. Just from I'm a person who runs a book review site. If I see that somebody has a connection with someone as influential as, like Todd Nahisi Coates and the book is in the niche, then it gets my brain going. It's like, oh, maybe they were in the same writing program, maybe they have the same agent, maybe they were in a panel together. Those are still beneficial. That means that that book could get good publicity. Like Ta Nahisi Coates books get good publicity. I like them. Bookstores and librarians still like them. I understand it from the Simon and Schuster side because their books are already getting in bookstores and libraries. They're succeeding there. Yeah. And I we need as much help as we can get as indies, and so I still like them. Media and trade reviews too are you can still use them as blurbs. So you don't necessarily have to have these crazy good connections. Although of course it's really helpful to have connections. All you need to do is get reviewed in these other platforms and you can use them in that way in terms of getting them like authentically. Just having an actually marketable book and story, I think is the most important. You have to have the recipient believe in that product before they endorse it. Sometimes blurbers don't read every word of every book, and so they want to be able to trust it just from the outset. So you have to look at it and be like, okay, this doesn't include any, like, problematic tropes in the description or the COVID isn't already bad. There are a lot of things that go into it, but make sure it's marketable right away and then just be genuine in your pitch. And maybe read their books before you pitch them.
- [48:45]
Joanna Penn
Not even maybe. I mean, this is what I was saying. The worst thing, I get so many pitches all the time and most of them are completely inappropriate. They're just not targeted at me, either my nonfiction or my fiction. And that is the most frustrating thing. And you Must, must completely understand this. But the targeting, it's better to send like three proper emails to people who, you know, are a good fit than just scatter gunning.
- [49:11]
Jo Walters
Absolutely. Yeah. And we can tell too when you say, oh, we've read your book or we read your website in my example, and then you use like a generic example which is in every book, make sure it's so pointed. Like if you're reaching out to a romance author and you read one of them and read them, don't just say, oh, the love story was so sweet. No, say like Timmy and Sarah in the locker room. Be so specific. Make sure that they see it and recognize like, oh yeah, they actually did read it. And I like that scene too. So hit their feels a little bit by being really specific.
- [49:50]
Joanna Penn
Yeah, definitely. I think, yeah, that's a really good tip. And I mean it really has to be a good fit with the genre. It be, has to, has to be. And I mean, because this, the thing, reading a book, this is not like listening to a song, for example. This is not like a three to five minute job. This is reading a book, which for most of us, we have so many books in our TBR list that sort of taking time out to read a book. The other thing I guess is the amount of time that you do this. I think one of the reasons traditional publishing is much better at this kind of thing is because they have such a long lead time. They might give people six months, months. Whereas most indies are like, oh, it comes out next week. So to do it a lot further in advance I guess would be another tip.
- [50:32]
Jo Walters
Yeah, absolutely.
- [50:34]
Joanna Penn
Okay, so then what about influencers and other media? So we don't have any connections with these people. But what. So say everybody wants a big name tick tocker, right? To, to do a review on their book, on their channel. So how can we research and pitch those types of people?
- [50:53]
Jo Walters
Yeah, I mean, I think first you have to have a good platform, not necessarily a big follower platform, although it would help. But make sure wherever you're pitching social media influencers in particular, that your platform is actually good at curating the content. Because if you want them to, if you think of it in terms of a collaboration, they want their stuff to get shared by your people too, to get seen by your people too. So build up your people, make sure that the actual content is likable, lovable, make sure it is unique and stands out and it is good shareable content first of all. And then in your, if you're looking for Instagram in particular, and you want to DM people who are influencers, you're gonna have to find a way to get them to follow you. I think that would be the biggest piece of it. So make a little seek out, not necessarily relationships, but engage with their stuff. Make sure they see you in the comments. Make sure you are being genuine and trying to form connections rather than just picking, pitching someone cold. Because if you pitch somebody cold who doesn't follow you on Instagram, you're gonna get buried in their message requests. So definitely try to work with that first. It's going to take a ton of time, but it's time that maybe if you're on social media already, you're already spending there. And so I think those things make a big difference over time. Makes a big difference too. So get started early. Don't just start a month before publication. But even if you do start a month before publication, you can still make it work as long as you are forming a connection over time. And so in terms of like finding those people too, all you have to do is. Yeah, so you just gotta, you gotta spend time on your platforms. Whichever platform you think would be most beneficial to you, spend time on it. See who is being successful, search your keywords, search your comp titles, search your categories, and, and let the TikTok algorithm start to show you more book stuff for sure. Because I mean, the only way to reach out to these people and find these people is to find them on those platforms first.
- [53:15]
Joanna Penn
Yes. So there's a whole load of people going, this sounds like a ton of work. I don't want to be doing this. This is absolute nightmare. So what are the lines around paying for reviews? Because, well, I mean, we mentioned that there are some ways around this, but I guess also tell us about independent book review, because I think you have both options, don't you? So tell us about that and how we can navigate paying for book reviews and what are some good ways to do that.
- [53:43]
Jo Walters
Yeah, first, it is a time nightmare sometimes. I wrote this book to be the most helpful for authors to recognize what they're up against and where they should be putting their time. Because realistically, there's just more time than you have to spend getting book reviews. But it's also not putting yourself on too much pressure. Recognize how much work this is, but don't take shortcuts by trying to pay for customer reviews. You cannot do it. You don't want your account banned, you don't want the other people's accounts banned. So make sure you put a full stop There don't try to get around it by getting Facebook friends or your person, you know your the person who lives in your house to write a review for you skip out on all that. But you can pay for other review services. You can pay people to research research for you. So you can just have that time. I already mentioned how many minutes you can spend just on Amazon pages trying to find customer reviewers. And if you don't have that much time because you have to write your next book, you can pay people to do it. You can find marketers or assistants on like Reedsy is a good source. Fiverr can have some good assistance as long as you do your good vetting. And then you can use services like I still like Pubby a lot because you get to read other and help other indie authors and get helped yourself in the process. So you can take advantage of the free or the paid resources for sure. For editorial reviews, which are blurbs, which are the things that you use in your marketing material from authors and experts and review companies so you can pay for Those, you can 100% pay for publicity, you can pay to get the chance. So all you're doing by paying for editorial review by a book review company like mine would be making sure your book is read and assessed and given an honest review by experts in the book reviewers. Instead of me paying for a book to get covered, you are paying for yours. That's all you're doing. You are making sure a reader puts your book on the top of your list and you'll end up with a for independent book review, 400 word or more book review that includes summary, if applicable, praise and criticism. So it really depends how they like your book and you can use it every time. But the only thing is you don't want to pay for I don't know how many editorial reviews you shouldn't pay every book review company you come across because you're going to lose a lot of money that way. Some it can go from $100 to 500 to $600. So make sure you recognize your budget beforehand. If you seem like you're spending too much time pitching if you are pitching too many media reviews, too many trade reviews and you're not getting any of them or only getting one and you really want to have blurbs by launch day, you can pay companies like mine to give you a chance for a couple sentences of a blurb and it can help. I think that you should probably have three to five editorial reviews on your Amazon page before publication. But I mean every Every author is different, every publisher is different. But I do think having that validity helps.
- [56:59]
Joanna Penn
Yeah, and it can also help your confidence. I mean, you mentioned netgalley before. I think a lot of indie authors have a difficult time with NetGalley because it is so dominated by traditional published books.
- [57:11]
Jo Walters
Books.
- [57:11]
Joanna Penn
And again, it's not necessarily the quality, but the reviewers themselves sometimes have a bit of an attitude towards indie books. So I would say that netgalley can be quite difficult and that it is potentially a better idea, as you say, to focus on other types of reviews. But one thing we do need to cover is, I mean everybody wants reviews, but what if they are a one star or a two star or even a three star reviews? Obviously we would love everything to be a five star review or a four star review. So how do we handle bad reviews? How do we handle negative reviews in general? Whether it is an editorial review or a customer review?
- [57:54]
Jo Walters
Yeah, first of all, breathe. These people are for customer reviews in particular. These people are not experts. They're not editors. Well, I mean they're experts in that they read all the time and they provide critical analysis of books, but they're not editors. They're not even here trying to improve your book. They're speaking to other readers and they have personal reading experiences. And that means that they could be coming at it with bias, with prejudices, with incorrect information. And so my favorite way for customer reviews, for dealing with negative customer reviews is to just get so many of them that the numbers don't affect you. Keep chasing them. If you have 5 negative reviews out of 20, get to 50. If you took your time with that content, if you really worked hard with it and you don't even agree with these customers, then the numbers will even out the more people you get. Sometimes it just depends one on one on one on one. So keep working. Don't stop. If you feel like it is abusive, the customer review is abusive, or it's about a product that's not even yours, so they're reviewing a TV instead of your book. You can hit report abuse under an Amazon customer review. They might not necessarily take it down, but you can try. Don't respond to them for sure. No matter where they are, Amazon or Goodreads, or if you had emailed them asking for a review in the past. And with media and trade reviews, if they are negative or mixed, I get a lot of people who are nervous about publishing it on my website if it is a mixed review or a critical one. And I just. Everybody's free to do whatever they want. I recommend publishing it anyway. I think it's helpful to be googleable. I think it is helpful because not every reader that makes it to my site reads every word of every review. Sometimes they scan. It's easier to scan on your eyes than it is to read every word on a digital screen. And so they might not even read that. Or if they do read the criticism, maybe they don't agree with it and just decide to do it anyway. It's just more content for your readers and your audience to engage with. If there's a negative review, try to take. It's impossible. I can say it all I want, but try to take your emotions and yourself out of it for a little bit. These are not meant to tell you you're doing something wrong. They are meant to speak to other readers. That's it. You can definitely think about them, but don't beat yourself up about them. Keep chasing good reviews. Keep working.
- [60:32]
Joanna Penn
Yeah, I, I also, same as you, I, I consider that you should just drown it. So drown it by getting more. More reviews. Yes. If you do get like say you get 50 reviews and they're all one start, then there is something wrong with either. There's probably something wrong with the book or you've really put it in the wrong place. Place. So let's say you've put up a book under like Christian Sweet Romance and it's full of hardcore violence and swearing and all kinds of other things. Then you, you've made a mistake in terms of positioning your book. So if you've positioned it well and it is a good product, then like you say, you, you will get some one star reviews. But you should mainly get all right reviews, I guess.
- [61:14]
Jo Walters
Yeah. And indie authors sometimes can run into a problem where they haven't gotten feedback before publishing. And it is just so important to actually hear criticism before you get going. Reviews is not the time to get your criticism. Even though it does happen sometimes. Criticism can be actually it's helpful to learn if you did something wrong. It is. You can fix it with this book if you wanted to edit it again. Or you can just fix it in your next one. Reviews are informative. They're about your author journey, about how you are presenting your book. If you're putting it in the right categories. It's. Yeah, listen to them. It's important.
- [61:54]
Joanna Penn
Yeah, that's interesting you say that because I've always paid for professional editing. So I've always had feedback and critical feedback before publishing. But you're right, there are a lot of people who don't do that anymore. So that would be, I guess, another tip. I still believe in professional editors. After know I think it's really important to keep to keep improving our craft, but also for that very reason. As you said, it's better to have other eyes on your book before publishing. Now all of that has been super useful. And of course you do have various things at Independent Book Review, so why don't you just tell us a bit more about the various things people can find there.
- [62:35]
Jo Walters
Yeah. So first and foremost, independentbookreview.com, is a site for readers. So if you're looking for cool indie books, that's what I try to do. I try to put together book lists, starred reviews, the best in indie publishing. So definitely start taking start reading indie books and come to independentbook review.com for it. But then for writers also we've got our you can submit your book for free if you'd like. You can buy an editorial review and guarantee it in a certain amount of time. Or you can get group beta reading. We also offer there. So basically there's I have a team of booksellers, librarians, reviewers, bloggers who will read your book before publication and share what they consider to be the most important takeaways from a reader's standpoint, not necessarily from an editor standpoint. So you can get group beta reading with us too. And then my book will be available through there too. Not direct fulfillment, but if you want to go to independentbookreview.com TheTruth that's the truth about book reviews, so you can just go ahead and find it there. And I also run the Write Indie newsletter, which you'll find on my website too. So everywhere really. Just go to independentbookreview.com you'll figure it out.
- [63:46]
Joanna Penn
Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jo. That was great.
- [63:50]
Jo Walters
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It means a ton.
- [63:55]
Joanna Penn
I hope you found the discussion with Jo useful and definitely check out his book as it is super actionable. And let's face it, we always need more reviews. And thank you you I always appreciate reviews on my own books. So let me know what you think of today's episode. Please leave a comment on the podcast show notes@thecreativepen.com or on the YouTube channel, or email me joannathecreativepenn.com send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard next Monday. I'm talking about the artisan author with Johnny B. Truant. And in the meantime, happy writing. And I'LL see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist episodes and show notes@thecreativepen.com podcast and you can get your free author blueprint@thecreativepen.com blueprint. If you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook and X the Creative Pen or on Instagram and Facebook. Fpenauthor Happy writing and I'll see you next time.