Be Careful of Sand Traps When Writing Reviews on Amazon
In the midst of my quest to learn as much as possible about effectively using reviews to promote an author’s books on Amazon/Kindle, I appear to have stepped into a sand trap.
Luckily marketer Aggie Villanueva wrote a blog post that alerted me to the problem and enabled me to dig myself out from under.
Briefly, here’s the deal:
Writing book reviews, especially books in your genre if you are an author yourself, is a good promotional tool. People can click on your name and signature automatically attached to your review by Amazon and be taken to your Amazon public profile where you can include information about your book.
In my book TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO MARKET A BOOK ON AMAZON AND FACEBOOK, I recommend writing reviews after optimizing one’s Amazon public profile (instructions on how to do this are included in this book).
Mea culpa: I should have realized that another author’s recommendation that I later followed to include a hot link to your own book in a review was likely to be a violation of Amazon’s review guidelines. (This tip is NOT in my book.)
I was very pleased with how I had legitimately worked in the mention of a book of mine in connection with the book I was reviewing, and then the ability to add a product hot link is conveniently there on the review function:
But as Aggie Villanueva explains in this excellent blog post, including your own book link is not an approved action for an Amazon book review.
(Here are Amazon’s own review guidelines: http://www.amazon.com/gp/community-help/customer-reviews-guidelines)
As soon as I read Aggie’s post — because I know how careful she is in everything she does — I immediately went to my reviews to correct my errors. Amazon had already removed several of the incorrect reviews I had done, and I edited the one incorrect review still remaining.
In retrospect, I should have considered the implications of this strategy before I did it myself. I had always wondered why Amazon allowed a product hot link in a review, and I was too willing to believe it was for the purpose of this strategy.
I hope that this post (and Aggie’s original post) will save other authors from stepping into the sand trap that I did. Or if you are already in that sand trap, dig yourself out right now!
On the other hand, Amazon offers wonderful opportunities for authors to legitimately promote their books. See some of these legitimate techniques in “TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO MARKET YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON AND FACEBOOK: Action Steps You Can Do Immediately Whether You Are Traditionally Published or Self-Published”
News flash: On Tuesday, July 24, and Wednesday, July 25, Pacific time, the KDP Select ebook thriller CIA FALL GUY and the KDP Select ebook TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO MARKET YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON AND FACEBOOK will be available for free download on Amazon.
CIA FALL GUY will be at http://amzn.to/L38eiP and TOP TIPS will be at http://amzn.to/N5H0Gj Mark your calendars now!
© 2012 Miller Mosaic LLC
Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. A new nonfiction ebook of hers is TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO MARKET YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON AND FACEBOOK and her newest fiction ebook is the thriller CIA FALL GUY.
Click here to visit her Amazon author page at amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller
She also has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the online marketing company www.MillerMosaicLLC.com
Hi Phyllis,
Another great informative blog. I just contacted Amazon customer review and posed some of my concerns with them regarding what we can and can’t include at the end of a review by a fellow author.
I’ll keep you posted on what I find out.
Thanks for letting me know about this post, Phyllis. I guess we all know that in order to post a review, one must have signed up to do so–much as one often must do that in order to comment on a blog post. And that link has quite a bit of space to add the name of a book, as an example. So, the name would be something like, “Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the award-winning novel This Is the Place.” There is a character limit, but it’s really quite liberal.
And, yes. I think that if we put our marketing beanies on, we can almost always find ways to associate our book(s) with the book we’re reviewing. The trick is to make it integral to the subject at hand, not something that looks blatantly self-promotional and takes attention away from the book being reviewed.
Those who want to know even more about the benefits Amazon offers authors may want to check out the chapter dedicated to Amazon in The Frugal Book Promoter (www.budurl.com/FrugalBkPromo).
Best,
Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Actually, Carolyn, you’ve presented another option for our reviews. I’m assuming that we can mention our own books in the context of a review as long as we do NOT include a hot link to the books.
Let’s see what Kathleen thinks about this option after getting a reply from Amazon today.
To be honest, I’ve never thought about mentioning my own book or work within the body of a review for another author’s work.
Thanks,
Kathleen
Kathleen — I had not thought of this either until I read the (erroneous) recommendation to put a hot link to one’s own book in a book review. That required writing a sentence in the review that connected the book mentioned to the book being reviewed.
Hmm it seems like your site ate my first comment (it was super long) so I guess I’ll just sum it up what I wrote
and say, I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog.
I too am an aspiring blog writer but I’m still new to the whole thing.
Do you have any helpful hints for rookie blog writers?
I’d certainly appreciate it.