Writers need to be careful when they’re approached to pay for book reviews. Some of these are real opportunities for marketing, some are well-meaning junk, and some are simply heartless cash-grabs by the organizers.
Paid reviews are simply where the author pays the reviewer. Kirkus has a branch dealing with this. It’s somewhat legit…but only in the sense that it is a review, which may or may not impress people who don’t know it’s a paid review. With the right marketing plan, paid reviews can get vital information out to large-scale book buyers like libraries and book clubs. Here’s a quick overview of review types.
A paid review needs to be professional, or at least literate. There’s a dank underbelly of publishing where scammers and hacks who can’t write their way out of a wet paper bag convince impressionable (usually self-pub) writers to pay $$$ for a ‘review’. Craigslist is rife with Amazon and Fiverr scams offering the chance to buy 5-star book reviews. Hint: those are generally not worth the money, and can even make your book stand out in the worst way. Check out the cautionary tale of Harriet Klausner.
Here’s an example of one such review request, that has been going around the internet for the last few months. I received mine a day or so ago, but the same spam message went out to thousands of writers:
Hello M,
I hope you do not mind me emailing you; I am emailing you because I would love to review your work on my website: https://redheadedbookloverblog.com. My site is a book reviewing website which has received a great response from readers and now that I have a loyal following who I adore, I am always on the lookout for great books I can feature for them. I discovered your work and I loved what I saw, so that is why I am emailing you today! Your work looks wonderful, and you clearly are passionate; passion is a quality I love because I am very passionate about reading so I hope we are able to work together.
Please feel free to email me if you are interested in my services. I do not want to bombard you with information in this email but am happy to let you know more about what I do and how I work. I have statistics to share with you, including my Amazon selling stats which will show you that my reviews enhance discoverability as well as increase sales and generate an ROI for the authors I work with.
Thank you so much for reading, please feel free to visit my website as well as email me any questions you may have. I look forward to hearing from you and hope that you have a wonderful rest of the day!
All best,
Aimee Ann
***
Note the intentionally vague pitch, which can stretch to fit whatever book the hapless author has actually written. I doubt ‘Aimee Ann’ has read any of my work; ‘Filigree’s Rule’ should have warned her off approaching me.
Here’s what Writer Beware has to say about this particular reviewer. The same person running this game is also offering to ‘edit’ for self-published writers. Ouch.