In the last installment of this series we took some baby steps, discussing how to write a short review that gave your opinion of a book and a reason or two why. Since then you’ve completed your homework assignment by writing and posting a short book review on Amazon, right? Don’t tell me your dog ate your homework. That might have worked when your homework was on paper, but it doesn’t in today’s electronic world. Continue reading “Reviewing 101 – Part 3”
Tag: Amazon reviews
Pitching to the New Gatekeepers – Part II
At the end of Part I, I promised to talk about some results I’d found relating to the influence of reviews on sales. Well here it is, and it’s a beauty.
The research is titled Estimating the Helpfulness and Economic Impact of Product Reviews: Mining Text and Reviewer Characteristics.
Put into layman’s terms, the researchers were looking for ways to reliably predict :
a) the types of reviews that would influence customers to buy,
b) and the types of reviews that would help merchants to sell.
I won’t pretend to understand the methodology, or the statistics, however I think it’s important to look at what the researchers were studying, and where. The ‘what’ included three categories of popular consumer goods : Continue reading “Pitching to the New Gatekeepers – Part II”
Reviewing 101 – Part 2
In Part 1 of this series we started with a tutorial on how to enter a customer review on Amazon. That’s the easy part; now it is time for the hard part, actually writing that review. One of the reasons the first part is easy is it has simple steps that are straight-forward to define with no alternatives or choices to be made. There is only one right way. Writing the review is hard because none of those things are true of that task. There is no one right way. There are no clearly defined steps. And just like the contents of the review, which is largely personal, how you go about writing it probably will be too.
There is a good chance this post will be as full of opinion as a review, but I’ll at least try to explain my reasoning. While I’ll primarily be focused on writing a review of a book to post on Amazon, most of the ideas I’ll throw out would, with a little tweaking, be applicable to writing a review of anything to post anywhere. (I spent several years reviewing music for a magazine and a few websites before I started my book review blog and found more similarities than differences between the two.)
A good place to start is establishing what the purpose of a review is. It’s simple and maybe shouldn’t even need to be stated. Yet, this purpose is easy to forget. Many people who haven’t bothered to consider this write reviews with no value, get upset with reviews that are written, or create conflict in the process some other way. It’s so important I’m going to emphasize it. Continue reading “Reviewing 101 – Part 2”
Reviewing 101 – Part 1
Odds are if you’re a reader who’s visiting Indies Unlimited that you read a lot of books, some (many? all?) of which are written by indie authors. If you’ve communicated with one of those authors, maybe sent them an email or posted a comment on their Facebook page telling them you loved their book, chances are good they’ve hit you up for a review. You don’t even have to make the first move to have this happen. Sometimes you’ll be reading a book, come to “The End,” and before you can page forward to read about the author you’ll find a message something like this: Continue reading “Reviewing 101 – Part 1”