I hope that by now you heard the news about Reedsy Discovery! We’re incredibly excited about launching it, as we’ve been working on it for the past year.

If you still don’t know what it’s all about, read our announcement here. You can also listen to me getting grilled about it by Kevin Tumlinson on the Wordslinger podcast here.

With the launch behind me, it’s now time to resume my usual weekly marketing newsletters! In particular, I'll be continuing my analysis of the conversion funnel — i.e. the different steps that readers take between finding your book and, well, purchasing it.

Previously in this series, we covered:

• how the reader judges your book by its cover [link]; and
• how the reader gets hooked — or bored — by your blurb [link].

Assuming your cover and blurb are on point, what’s the third thing most readers are going to look at before they purchase? Your reviews. My very first Reedsy marketing newsletter (from over a year ago!) actually tackled the topic of reviews (read here), but I wanted to revisit it from a conversion angle today.
 

Quantity vs quality

I see a lot of confusion and myths out there about book reviews. The biggest one, probably, is that Amazon reviews directly influence your book’s position in the rankings and lists. That has been proven untrue time and again.

Amazon reviews only influence one thing: how readers perceive your book when they come across it. In other words, reviews aren’t really a factor of discoverability. They’re a factor of conversion.

Bearing that in mind, what exactly is it about reviews that matters? Getting as many reviews as possible? Getting only positive reviews? Getting in-depth reviews? Reviews from famous people?

Let’s put our reader hats on for a moment. When you come across a book on Amazon, what is it exactly that you look for in the reviews? Personally, I tend to look at:

• The number of reviews. The more reviews a book has, the more successful it appears. It’s a basic element of social validation, like likes on a Facebook post or YouTube video.
• Featured (top) reviews. Amazon ranks reviews based on when they were published (newer reviews get more prominence) and how many other readers upvoted them as “useful.” Generally, only the first 2-10 reviews will show up on the book’s page. 

Not all reviews are created equal

All that to say: it’s not all about numbers. The quality of the review matters. One positive review that goes in-depth into why the reviewer liked your book is worth more than 100 positive reviews that consist of generic “loved it!” one-liners. This is not only because it’ll get more “helpful” upvotes and therefore show up first on Amazon, but because you’ll also be able to use an excerpt from it for your book description, or even ads. 

A well-written, meaningful, and positive review is an element of social validation that can greatly improve your conversion and turbocharge your ads. This is what the concept of Reedsy Discovery is all about: using meaningful reviews to help promote books to readers.

So, how do you get such a review (short of, you know, submitting to Reedsy Discovery)? Well, we also keep a free and updated directory of book review bloggers, which is always a good place to start. If a reviewer has a blog, it means they’re serious about reviewing, and will probably write a review with more meat than your average reader. The downside is that most reviewers are already swamped under submissions, so you’ll need to make sure you reach out to them well in advance of your launch.

That’s a wrap for our analysis of the conversion funnel as a whole! Again, I urge you to regularly do an audit of all of your books’ presence on Amazon, and consider whether you could improve the covers, the blurb, or the reviews. Small changes in the conversion funnel can translate into huge changes in your royalty statement!

Until next week,
Ricardo