Intro

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, how important is ‘truth' in memoir? The Observer on Raynor Winn's The Salt Path; Raynor's statement; Memoir controversies [The Guardian]; Tips on memoir writing and ‘truth'; The Buried and the Drowned Short Story Collection; and when life stops you from achieving a goal.

Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Joe 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 IndependentBookReview.com, which focuses on reviewing indie books.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• What are the three different types of book reviews?
• How to get customer reviews, whether you're a new author or more established
• Why blurbs / editorial reviews are still worth getting and how to use them
• Pitching influencers, book bloggers, and more
• What kind of reviews can you pay for, and what can you definitely NOT pay for?
• Handling negative reviews, and the importance of getting feedback before publication

You can find Joe at IndependentBookReview.com.

Transcript of Interview with Joe Walters

Joanna: Joe 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 IndependentBookReview.com, which focuses on reviewing indie books. So welcome to the show, Joe.

Joe: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Joanna: 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.

Joe: I started writing back in college and fell in love with it through Ray Bradbury. I wanted to be a high school English teacher, but I learned pretty quickly that teaching was a lot of work when I came home, and not the same as discussing books in college.

So, I decided to become a volunteer reader for a literary magazine called Indianola Review. We were print and digital, and I would read short stories with a team and vote on whether they would be published. I absolutely loved that.

I moved away from teaching and became a server so that I could have more time to read and write. While I was serving, I found a job in Oregon as the marketing director at a small press called Inkwater Press.

By some miracle, I got that job and had to figure out what book marketing was. It's a long game, and I read your book and so many others about how to do it. I got my feet wet, figured out how to market and sell books, and how to get authors who I knew cared about their writing read by more people.

Then I had to move from Portland, Oregon, and come back home to 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.

I started building that and worked freelance for two other indie presses, Paper Raven Books and Sunbury Press. I was targeting book reviews for them, doing metadata, book descriptions, author bios—anything you could think of for book marketing.

I was doing all of that for those presses while building Independent Book Review. A couple of years ago, Independent Book Review became my full-time job. So every day, I'm editing and promoting reviews, and it's truly the best job I've ever had.

Joanna: 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.

Why did you choose indie books?

Joe: 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. Their books are still great.

They still get editing and great cover design, but they don't have big teams or a lot of money behind them pushing the books. I knew how much I could at least be another voice for them.

“Indie” really means all of the authors that you know down the street, your friends. It's very rare that you're friends with Stephen King.

I'm trying to help the little guy who loves writing and books and just wants to get his work out there.

So, I'm all indie all the time, that's for sure. Except for my leisure reading—sometimes I dabble elsewhere.

Joanna: We all read around. When you are a big reader like we are, you hardly ever look at the publisher, right? It's not like we go shopping by publisher, but you are right in terms of who reviews stuff. Then your own book—

What kind of writing have you done, and tell us why you wanted to do this book?

Joe: I've always been a fiction writer. I've been writing short stories for a long time. I'm still working on a novel I started 10 years ago, and it's not there yet. I wanted to finish that book before I got my book review book out, but then I just had to get the book review book out.

I couldn't wait on my little 10-year-old protagonist anymore. I had to jump in and offer my expertise to the indie community for book reviews.

Mostly, 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, customer reviews—I got all of these questions all the time. I wanted to create a resource for all of those authors.

I enjoy writing about it too. I've been writing book marketing blogs for years, and I always thought that was my best chance of making jokes. So I filled my book with jokes and as much experience and knowledge as I have, and 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. I just tried to gather all of the things in one place instead of authors and presses searching forever to figure out what works.

I tried to compress everything I know into one document, and now I've got it with The Truth About Book Reviews.

Joanna: It is super useful. We are going to come to the content of the book in a minute. Given that this was, I guess, your first self-publishing experience, how did that go?

Did you learn anything that made you understand why being an indie is difficult?

Joe: 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 I have to do for Independent Book Review and in my everyday life, three months was impossible.

Initially, I said, “Oh, this book's going to be out in January,” and here we are with a July 10th release date and I'm still sprinting. So that is difficult.

Also, I tried to upload my ebook for KDP pre-order about two weeks ago with a different subtitle, and they shut me down four or five different times before I had to change it. I even told my wife, “I'm not changing the subtitle. I like it too much. I'm not keyword farming or anything. I'm not cheating.”

My book is about books. 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.

I had it three times, 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.

Joanna: This is so interesting. With my very first book, I also put up something—this was in the early days when there was only really Amazon in terms of self-publishing. I had something like “From Idea to Amazon” as a subtitle, and they shut that down because, of course, I used their own company name, and I understood that.

The word “book” does seem a little extreme, especially when it's about book reviews. But this is the point, there are all of these things that are difficult to do.

So 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.

What are the different types of book reviews and where can they be used?

Joe: I separate them into three different types of reviews. I've seen other marketers separate them into four, but let's stick with three for now.

The first one in my timeline is blurbs or editorial reviews. Basically, those are like testimonials for your book.

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. That could 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, and bam, that's helping other readers and browsers see that this could be a book for them.

You can also put it on your 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 Amazon page. I love those. You can also use it on things like your website and on social media graphics.

One of my favorite things to do is to use it in future pitches. 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's quality has already been gate-kept in a way that indie authors aren't always.

It's a way for readers to see, “Okay, somebody read this book and somebody said it was good.” So those would be blurbs or editorial reviews.

The second type of review I consider media or trade reviews. Media reviews, to me, are any reviews in the media. I'm going to 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. Podcasts aren't always necessarily a review, but it's media.

Then trade reviews are from trade review publications—publications that focus only on books, as opposed to bigger media like People that focuses on culture and fashion and all sorts of cool stuff in addition to books. You can use those in different ways too.

The first of which is publicity. Share that link with your audience. Then you can put it on your websites as well. Just like blurbs, you can pull a quote from your larger review and use it with newsletters, websites, and social media. You can also put it in distributor backends like PublishDrive or IngramSpark.

The third type of review is the most common and probably the most difficult: customer reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo.

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 to find out what everyday people are saying about it. So that is a totally different strategy than the strategy that you would use for media reviews.

Joanna: That is a great overview.

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. It's very hard to advertise a book with no reviews.

The comments I get from authors now are, “Oh, well, it's all right for you. You've got X number of reviews.” And I'm like, “Yeah, we all start somewhere.” So if someone listening is like, “Okay, 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?

Joe: 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.

My favorite way to get customer reviews is using comp titles. Even if you wrote the most unique book you've ever read, other people have written unique books. You should have been reading other books similar to yours while you were writing it or before, but you can check them out now on the bestseller pages on Amazon.

You can find books that are similar to yours, and then find out where 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 100 to 500 review range. 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.

You can also do the same thing with smaller blogs. Smaller blogs can turn into customer reviews pretty often.

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 give yourself a pretty good shot of pitching for a customer review from those places. Asking for the blog review first and seeing if it can convert into a customer review.

Then there's also building 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 with in a writing workshop or something in the past—as long as they're not Facebook friends with you, so they shouldn't be really close people to you—you can build launch teams by recognizing who you've interacted with in the past and who might want to support you.

Ask them to read an early copy so that they can help out in that first week of publication. I did that with my newsletter a lot. I built a launch team through my newsletter by just creating a form for people to sign up and putting it in my automation sequence. I ended up getting 20-plus people to offer to review the book.

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.

You can also try paid resources. You can't pay for customer reviews, but you can pay places like Pubby, where you can read other indie author books and get your book reviewed in return. They work around it in that way.

Then you can try things like BookFunnel, StoryOrigin, and NetGalley. PubNook is another one like Pubby. There are options; it's just about time.

Joanna: This is so important.

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 are saying, “Here's my book.” I always just say, “If you like it and would like to leave a review, I'd really appreciate that.”

Even with 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. There are lots of these services, but that's not allowed. So as you say, there are ways around it, but we have to be clear.

If I send out an email to my review list, my ARC team, maybe one out of three, or sometimes one in two, will actually leave a review within the period. So even people who've signed up to say they will do a review… I guess what I'm saying is don't get annoyed with people if they don't.

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.

Joe: Yes, 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. So if they leave a review, that is super helpful, but if they disappear, that's okay too. Don't chase people and be annoyed. Do not chase them.

Joanna: These lovely book bloggers do all this stuff basically for the love of it, and they just get so many pitches. So, yes, it is one of those sort of frustrating areas, but also really important.

So let's say, like me, when I was a new author, I did make a lot more effort. There'll be authors listening who have an email list, they have a lot of books. The more backlist you have, the more difficult it is to try and tell people which book you need reviews on.

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.

Joe: This is 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, the easiest way, is to make sure that there's a page at the end of the book that includes an actual clickable link. What I like to do is create a redirection link before your book is available. My redirection link is independentbookreview.com/reviewlink. I just use that through WordPress.

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. So right now, pre-publication, it's taking you to a Goodreads review page, which you can have beforehand.

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 the person has to do is click that link when the book is already out.

You should have changed it to the ebook review link, so you don't have to edit anything. It's just automatically clickable. So that's one of my favorite ways to do it, for sure. Then you don't have to do any work after that.

I also like automation sequences in emails. You can set up a special sign-up page for those who read your book. Let's say you have a specific link that you send them to in your bio or in the front matter.

They sign up via a specific form that separates them in your email company, and you can have a review request that automatically goes out to whoever signed up for that 30 days after, for example. You already know that these are the people who came from your book. I like automation sequences in emails, for sure.

And then, make it easy to find on your website. All you need is “Contact for review copies.” It's very simple. Have an email if you want, or a contact box. You can also have a Google Form or a Jotform for people to click and say, “I want to join my ARC team.”

They sign up, put their information in, and you will already have somebody to send it out to the next time your book comes out.

Joanna: I like those, 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. Indies have never really done this as much.

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.”

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 these are useful?

How can we get them in an authentic way rather than just always pitching famous names?

Joe: Yes, I love that article. Somebody said it finally. I feel like it's so true. Rewarding connections over talent—blurbs are connections.

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 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 mean that maybe they share an agent with that author or have the same indie press.

But it's still about needing more content, and blurbs are content. You can't be the one who calls your book spectacular, so putting somebody else's name on there is beneficial.

Connections are good too. I'm a person who runs a book review site. If I see that somebody has a connection with someone as influential as Ta-Nehisi 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-Nehisi Coates's 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 into bookstores and libraries. They're succeeding there. We need as much help as we can get as indies, so I still like them.

Media and trade reviews can also be used 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 on these other platforms, and you can use them in that way.

In terms of getting them 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 blurb writers 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 problematic tropes in the description, or the cover 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.

Joanna: I mean, this is what I was going to say. The worst thing is I get so many pitches all the time, and most of them are completely inappropriate.

They're just not targeted at me, either my non-fiction or my fiction, and that is the most frustrating thing.

It's better to send three proper emails to people who you know are a good fit than just scatter-gunning.

Joe: Absolutely. And we can tell too, when you say, “I've read your book” or “I read your website,” and then you use a generic example that is in every book, make sure it's so pointed.

If you're reaching out to a romance author and you've read one of their books, don't just say, “Oh, the love story was so sweet.” No. Say something like, “Timmy and Sarah in the locker room.” Be so specific.

Make sure that they see it and recognize, “Okay, they actually did read it, and I like that scene too.” So hit their feels a little bit by being really specific.

Joanna: Definitely. I think that's a really good tip.

It also has to be a good fit with the genre. Reading a book is not like listening to a song. 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 on our TBR list, that taking time out to read a book is significant.

The other thing I guess is the amount of time. 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, whereas most indies are like, “Oh, it comes out next week.” So doing it a lot further in advance, I guess, would be another tip.

Joe: Yes, absolutely.

Joanna: Okay. So then what about influencers and other media? We don't have any connections with these people. Everybody wants a big-name TikToker to do a review on their book on their channel.

How can we research and pitch influencers?

Joe: 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.

If you think of it in terms of a collaboration, they want their stuff to get seen by your people too. So build up your people, make sure that the actual content is likable, lovable, unique, stands out, and is good, shareable content, first of all.

Then, if you are looking for Instagram in particular and you want to DM influencers, you're going to have to find a way to get them to follow you. I think that would be the biggest piece of it. So 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 pitching someone cold because if you pitch somebody cold who doesn't follow you on Instagram, you're going to 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 are already spending there. So I think those things make a big difference over time.

Get started early. Don't just start a month before publication.

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.

In terms of finding those people, you just have to 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 let the TikTok algorithm start to show you more book stuff.

The only way to reach out to and find these people is to find them on those platforms first.

Joanna: 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 an absolute nightmare.” So what are the lines around paying for reviews? We mentioned that there are some ways around this.

I guess also tell us about Independent Book Review, because I think you have both options, don't you? So tell us about that.

How can we navigate paying for specific types of book reviews, and what are some good ways to do that, while avoiding the scams?

Joe: Yes. 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.

It's also about not putting too much pressure on yourself. 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 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 do research for you. 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 Reedsy, which is a good source. Fiverr can have some good assistants as long as you do your vetting. Then you can use services like Pubby, which I still like a lot, because you get to read and help other indie authors and help yourself in the process.

For editorial reviews, which are blurbs that you use in your marketing material from authors, experts, and review companies, you can pay for those.

You can one hundred percent pay for publicity.

When you pay for an editorial review by a book review company like mine, you are making sure your book is read, assessed, and given an honest review by experts—the book reviewers.

You are making sure a reader puts your book on the top of their list, and you'll end up with a 400-word or more book review from Independent Book Review. It includes a summary and, if applicable, praise and criticism. So it really depends on how they like your book.

The only thing is, you don't want to pay for too 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. It can go from $100 to $500 to $600. So make sure you recognize your budget beforehand.

If you feel like you're spending too much time pitching—if you are pitching too many media and trade reviews and 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 of sentences of a blurb. It can help.

I think that you should probably have three to five editorial reviews on your Amazon page before publication, but every author is different, every publisher is different. Although I do think having that validity helps.

Joanna: It can also help your confidence. You mentioned NetGalley before. I think a lot of indie authors have a difficult time with NetGalley because it is so dominated by traditionally published books.

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.

One thing we do need to cover is, everybody wants reviews, but what if they are one-star or two-star, or even three-star reviews? Obviously, we would love everything to be a five-star 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?

Joe: Yes. First of all, breathe.

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 provide critical analysis of books, but they're not here trying to improve your book.

They're speaking to other readers, and they have personal reading experiences. That means that they could be coming at it with bias, with prejudices, with incorrect information.

My favorite way 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 five negative reviews out of 20, get to 50.

If you took your time with that content, if you really worked hard on it and you don't even agree with these customers, then the numbers will even out. The more people you get, the more it evens out. So keep working. Don't stop.

If you feel like 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, Goodreads, or if you had emailed them asking for a review in the past.

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 or critical review. I recommend publishing it anyway. I think it's helpful to be Googleable.

It's 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 with your eyes than it is to read every word on a digital screen.

So they might not even read the negative part, or if they do read the criticism, maybe they don't agree with it and just decide to read the book anyway. It's just more content for your readers and your audience to engage with.

If there's a negative review, try to take your emotions and yourself out of it for a little bit. It's impossible, I can say it all I want, but try. These are not meant to tell you you're doing something wrong. They're 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.

Joanna: I also, same as you, consider that you should just drown it by getting more reviews.

Joe: Yes.

Joanna: Say you get 50 reviews and they're all one-star, then there is something wrong. Either there's probably something wrong with the book, or you've really put it in the wrong place.

So let's say you've put up a book under “Christian Sweet Romance” and it's full of hardcore violence and swearing and all kinds of other things, then 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 will get some one-star reviews, but you should mainly get alright reviews, I guess.

Joe: Yes, and indie authors sometimes can run into a problem where they haven't gotten feedback before publishing. It is just so important to actually hear criticism before you get going. Reviews are not the time to get your criticism, even though it does happen.

Sometimes criticism can be actually helpful to learn if you did something wrong. 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. Listen to them. It's important.

Joanna: 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 are 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. I think it's really important 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—

Tell us a bit more about Independent Book Review?

Joe: First and foremost, IndependentBookReview.com is a site for readers. So if you're looking for cool indie books, that's what I tried to do. I tried to put together book lists, starred reviews, the best in indie publishing. So definitely start reading indie books and come to IndependentBookReview.com for it.

But then for writers also, 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, which we also offer.

Basically, I have a team of booksellers, librarians, reviewers, and 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's standpoint. So you can get group beta reading with us too.

My book will be available through there too. Not direct fulfillment, but if you want to go to independentbookreview.com/thetruth, you can just go ahead and find it there.

I also run the Write Indie newsletter, which you'll find on my website too. Really, just go to IndependentBookReview.com, you'll figure it out.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Joe. That was great.

Joe: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It means a ton.

The post How To Get More Book Reviews With Joe Walters first appeared on The Creative Penn.