General Questions
Questions About Putting Your Book on Novel Reviewers
Questions About Our Reviewers
Questions About the Review Process
Yes, of course! We're designed for small publishers and independent or self-published authors. So if you're a self-published or independent author, we consider you to be the publisher of your own books.
You're in the right place!
Book reviews are super important for authors, for a wide variety of reasons. Most importantly, retail sites like Amazon take reviews into account when determining a book's search position, relevance, popularity, and placement on lists like their "New and Popular" feature - that means quality reviews can do great things for your books (and your sales).
Reviews also generate "buzz" for your books - Facebook posts, Tweets, blog posts, and more all lead to more people talking about your books. More people talking about your books leads to more people buying your books. More people buying your books means your income goes up - and as several breakout authors have already proven, the sky's the limit.
Books don't just sell themselves. Promotion, marketing, finding reviews and review blogs, drumming up interest, finding new readers - it all takes a time. And sure, you can do it all on your own.
Or you could write. You probably like writing. We definitely like all that marketing stuff you've been doing instead of writing.
If you spend your time writing and we spend our time getting your books in front of high-quality reviewers, you're going to be able to write more and sell more. Let's both spend our time doing the stuff we love. It's a match made in heaven.
Plus, you'll be able to monitor all of your reviewer activity through Novel Reviewers in one easy spot. On your dashboard, you'll be able to tell which reviewers you've approved to read what books, as well who has reviewed your books and who still owes you their thoughts.
Once you approve a reviewer, we'll handle the follow-up. Twenty, forty, and sixty days after you approve a reviewer to access your book, we'll automatically nudge them to review your book (if they haven't already) via email.
We also nudge reviewers who leave reviews on the Novel Reviewers site but don't include links to where their review has gone up on outside sites, like Amazon, Goodreads, Facebook and others.
All of the books available on Novel Reviewers can be found on the on the Explore Books page. You can search books by title, author, publisher, genre, character type, literary trope, setting, and more. We try to make it as easy as possible to both browse through our available library and quickly narrow down to exactly the books you want to read.
However, no one can request a book for review unless they have a reviewer account and are logged into the website.
We offer several extremely competitive price points for publishers who want to tap into our community of reviewers.
In order to list your book on the site, you’ll need to purchase a subscription. You can learn more about our available plans on our pricing page.
Yes. If you are a publisher interested in purchasing 5 or more shelf spaces at a time, please contact us for discounted pricing.
No, there’s not. Once you add a book to a shelf space, you can share that book with as many people as you want to approve. We do not place any caps on how many reviews your book can potentially receive.
We guarantee honest reviews. An honest review, however, is not always what an author would consider “positive.”
We DO NOT sell five star reviews, nor do we make any claim that by listing your book at Novel Reviewers that you will receive any five star reviews or even any positive reviews, period.
The reviewers on Novel Reviewers are independent readers who are encouraged to leave their honest, thoughtful review after reading a book.
Our philosophy is that as long as a reviewer clearly states why a book did or did not work for them, that all reviews are good reviews.
We know this may seem confusing, but hear us out:
The very reason why someone might say a book is a five-star read for them could be the reason why another reader won’t even be interested in picking that book up. Alternatively, some readers might absolutely LOVE the character trope that made another reviewer mark a book as one-star.
When it comes to analyzing reviewer ratings on retail sites or Goodreads, it helps readers to see a varied star profile. This lets them know that reviewers were honest and not just friends of a publisher who gave it high marks due to their relationship with the author.
In general, no.
In some extremely limited situations - completely at our discretion - we will remove reviews which contain things such as author attacks or hate speech.
To date, we have not removed any reviews.
The first thing you need to do is purchase a listing by clicking the “Add Shelf Space” button on your publisher dashboard. Once you have purchased a Shelf Space, then you’ll want to add your book.
From your dashboard, click the link that says “Add A New Title.” Here, you'll be able to create the book; enter a synopsis and other details; upload your cover photo; "tag" the book as belonging to certain genres, containing certain characters and/or tropes, and taking place in certain settings; upload the various eBook files for your book, leave notes for reviewers and add any marketing materials you have for blogger or reviewers to use across social media.
At the bottom of the page to add a book, you’ll have two options via drop down menu.
The first option is to keep your title archived and invisible, which means that you will be the only person who can see the book. This is useful when you are planning to rotate several books through a listing and want to set all the books up in bulk.
The second option is to put your title into your Shelf Space, which will make it live on the website.
Once you have made your selection, click the green button that says “Create My New Title!” and you’ll be good to go.
In addition to adding your basic book information such as cover, title, blurb and excerpt, we have four ways in which we classify books: genres, tropes, characters and settings.
Our collection of qualifiers is growing every day thanks to people like you - please always feel free to contact us anytime to suggest a new genre, trope, character or setting that you'd like to see on the site. We LOVE it when you do this.
You can "tag" your book with any qualifier in our collection. Doing a thorough job of classifying your book will make it super easy for our reviewers to find it - especially the reviewers who are most likely to love it. When the tags you add match up with tags that reviewers selected as relating to books they like to read, your book will show up for them on their dashboard as a suggested book.
You can also add publisher notes and marketing materials to your book. If you're looking for reviews on a certain site, feedback about a certain aspect of the book, have specific additional materials you'd like to link for the book (like character bios, book trailers, social media graphics, etc.), you can add them in your notes.
Marketing materials like these make it easy for reviewers who contribute to a blog to put together an awesome post highlighting your book with visible media.
Yes! We love it when authors add their marketing material to their title listings.
For each title, publishers can provide up to three images and a PDF of additional marketing notes for their book. Only reviewers who have been approved to review the book can see/download this information.
Nobody can download your books through our site unless you specifically give them permission to do so.
Registered reviewers at NovelReviewers.com can request your permission to review your books. You've got the power to grant or deny that permission on a case-by-case basis.
In order to make a decision, you should absolutely check each reviewer’s profile and links carefully to make sure you feel like they are the right reviewer for your book. On their profile, you’ll be able to see their bio, links to their other social media and blog pages, reviews that they have left on Novel Reviewers, the type of books they enjoy reading and their placement ratio.
A reviewer's "placement ratio" is the number of books they've been approved to review versus the number they've actually approved. A 100% ratio means this reviewer has reviewed every title they've ever been approved to read, and that they currently have no approved requests still awaiting their review. This value is calibrated when the reviewer submits their first review. Until then, it's marked 'NYC' (Not Yet Calibrated). Remember, reviewers often have a few books in their to-be-read pile. A low ratio doesn't necessarily indicate a "bad reviewer." This is especially true for newer readers submitting their first reviews since this ratio is quite volatile at first. For example, a new reader approved for five titles would have a ratio of only 20% after their first review. Just three more reviews would bring that up to a solid 80%! The moral: this Placement Ratio is just one tool to help you determine whether to approve or deny a reviewer's request - it doesn't tell the whole story by itself.
If you do not feel like a reviewer is a good match for your book, we encourage you to decline their request.
Once you discover reviewers that you love to work with, you can add them to your "favorites" list - their requests will always be automatically approved, making it easy for you and your favorite reviewers to connect on future books.
TL;DR: Nobody can download your books without your permission first and we try to make it easy to figure out if you want a certain reviewer to access your books or not.
We don't tolerate piracy, and will use the full force of the DMCA ("Digital Millennium Copyright Act") to crack down on any instances of such actions. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of how this is handled, please refer to our Terms and Conditions page. If you prefer analogies, think of it like this: you're a ship's captain, and a pirate ship approaches. You shoot and disable the ship. What do you say to your crew?
1. "Let's go pick up the survivors," or
2. "Keep shooting - there might be survivors."
We'd say #2, and so would our lawyers.
When you grant a reviewer permission to review your book, you grant that permission ONLY to that reviewer. Not that reviewer's "review blog team," or their friends, or anyone else. Just. One. Person. We take piracy very seriously, and ask that you report any instances of suspected piracy to us using the "Contact Staff" form in your Publisher Dashboard.
All that having been said, we'd like to add one more thing: Novel Reviewers is designed with indie authors and publishers in mind. Most of our content creators, before joining up with us, spent a great deal of their time hunting for reviewers and sending them DRM-free review copies of their books. There's a reason for this: obscurity is a far greater threat to your livelihood than piracy. There is simply very little overlap between "People Who Pirate Books" and "People Who Pay For Books."
The result of this truth is that book piracy has a negligible directly negative impact on your bottom line, but a not-insignificant impact on the size of your total audience. In other words, a person who pirates your book isn't a person who would otherwise have paid for your book. Generally, it's a person who otherwise wouldn't have read your book at all. If it's a choice between $0.00 or one more reader in your audience, we think the choice is clear.
We're not turning a blind eye to piracy. Novel Reviewers has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to our platform being used as a vehicle for piracy. Should we discover an instance of piracy, we will investigate swiftly and will permanently ban any guilty parties. We will drop the legal hammer as hard as we can in the process. But at the end of the day, our primary goal is to put your books in front of high-quality reviewers - people who have a track record of delivering and distributing their reviews. Before you approve a request from a reviewer, check out their profile. Message them if you're still not sure. Our hope is that the tools and information we put at your fingertips will allow you to keep your books out of the hands of pirates from the beginning and that none of this will ever be a concern for you.
Please do! On each of your listing pages, there is a button where you can share your page directly on Facebook or you can share the link throughout your marketing.
The reviewers listed on Novel Reviewers come from a variety of places.
Sometimes we court specific reviewers and invite them to join our Novel Reviewers family because we think they are rock stars. Some reviewers find us through organic search or social media and visit us.
We think it's a great idea to check out a reviewer before approving or denying their request to review one of your books. Their profile will tell you a lot, including their "placement ratio" - a measure of how many books they've been approved to review versus how many books they've actually reviewed.
Ever get tired of sending out ARC copies of your book and never getting reviews? Now you can make sure your reviewers have a solid track record of reviewing books before approving their requests!
When a reviewer registers a new account, they will initially be able to request up to 10 books. After they have requested 10 titles, their ability to request more titles will be locked until they review at least 2 of the titles for which they've received approvals.
Just like you classify your book with certain genres, tropes, characters and settings, our reviewers classify their reading preferences using the same library of qualifiers. At a glance, this list of reading preferences makes it easy to tell from a reviewer's profile if they are the right audience for your book.
Additionally, you can dig a little deeper on their profile to get a feel for how they review books and what outside sources they place their reviews on before making a final decision.
Before you ever approve a reviewer to review your book, check their "placement ratio." This is a measure of the number of books they've been approved to review versus the number of books they've actually reviewed.
A reviewer's "placement ratio" is the number of books they've been approved to review versus the number they've actually approved. A 100% ratio means this reviewer has reviewed every title they've ever been approved to read, and that they currently have no approved requests still awaiting their review. This value is calibrated when the reviewer submits their first review. Until then, it's marked 'NYC' (Not Yet Calibrated). Remember, reviewers often have a few books in their to-be-read pile. A low ratio doesn't necessarily indicate a "bad reviewer." This is especially true for newer readers submitting their first reviews since this ratio is quite volatile at first. For example, a new reader approved for five titles would have a ratio of only 20% after their first review. Just three more reviews would bring that up to a solid 80%! The moral: this Placement Ratio is just one tool to help you determine whether to approve or deny a reviewer's request - it doesn't tell the whole story by itself.
You don't just want reviews - you want quality reviews that help you and your book succeed. On any reviewer's page, you'll be able to see all the reviews they've left at NovelReviewers.com. Importantly, you'll also be able to see links to the outside sites where those reviews have been posted - sites like Goodreads, Amazon, and more. We strongly encourage our reviewers to distribute their reviews far and wide, because that helps create buzz for you as an author.
On that same reviewer page you'll be able to read the reviewer's biography, get information about what they like to read, and more.
With all of that information at your fingertips, you should feel confident when you hit "Accept" on a Review Request that you're putting your book into the hands of a quality reviewer. And remember, you can always explore and find new reviewers before they find you, and invite them to review your books from their profile page.
Absolutely! There are several different ways you can send an invitation to a reviewer to review your book:
1. From a reviewer's profile page
If you're on a reviewer's profile page, you can send an invitation to that reviewer to review any of your listed books. Just pick the books you want to send invites for in the drop down menu below their profile picture, and fire away!
2. From your "Favorite Reviewers" page
If you decide you're a great match for a reviewer, you can always add them to your list of Favorites. If one of your favorite reviewers requests permission to review one of your books, that request will automatically be approved. You can also go to your Favorite Reviewers page and invite those reviewers to come review your books if they haven't yet requested them.
In any case, you can only send one invitation per reviewer per book. In other words, you can't send multiple spammy invitations to the same reviewer to review the same book.
The reviewer will receive a notice that that they've been approved via email and your book will show up on their dashboard as awaiting review. They'll be encouraged to go ahead and download your book onto their reading device as soon as the request is approved or the invitation is accepted.
We'll keep in touch with them with gentle reminders to review your book when they're done. You'll be able to track how many "outstanding approvals" (approved requests that haven't generated reviews yet) you have from your dashboard.
If you deny a review request, you can choose to give a reviewer a reason why you denied their request and they will receive an email letting them know your feedback. The request then disappears from their dashboard and they cannot request the title again.
If you invite a reviewer to review your book, the same protocol applies. If they deny your invitation and select a reason, then you will receive an email with their feedback. The invitation will disappear from their dashboard and you cannot invite them to review that title again.
Once a reviewer requests a book or an author sends an invitation for a reviewer to read a book, a timer starts behind the scenes. If the request or invitation is not responded to within a two week period, our system will automatically archive the request or invite.
Once this happens, the review can request the title again or the author can resend the invitation, but we tend to think that no response is sometimes a response in itself.
Although we love the look of a full library, Novel Reviewers is only setup for eBook distribution.
Occasionally, we do utilize paperback copies of books listed on Novel Reviewers in digital content such as Instagram and other social media outlets. When we do this, we in turn give away those copies via social media.
If you are interested in participating in this program or other special publisher marketing programs through Novel Reviewers, please contact us for more information.
Reviewers first write their review and leave it on NovelReviewers.com. You'll receive a notification when this happens, and the review for your book will have its own dedicated, public page that you can share through your own social media channels.
Reviewers then distribute this review to other sites where they're active - social media sites like Facebook and Goodreads, retail sites like Amazon, and more. Links to these distributed reviews will be visible to you as well. We encourage our reviewers to distribute their reviews, because we love reviewers who love talking about books - and you should, too.
Life happens. Or maybe the book just wasn't what they expected. That's okay, but we do request that they leave a review on Novel Reviewers anyway so that their placement ratio doesn’t suffer and you know what happened to that reviewer.
All reviewers have the option to mark their review as "Did Not Finish." When they select this option when leaving feedback, the only people who can see the review are the reviewer who posted the review and the author whose book is being reviewed. The review is not visible on the website and does not affect a title’s star rating on the Novel Reviewers.
If a reviewer marks a book as DNF, we do not encourage them to leave the review on other websites.
We forget stuff, too. Our lead developer hasn't left the office in four months because he can't remember where he put his keys.
Don't worry. We send reviewers a reminder via email twenty, forty, and sixty days after they are approved to review a book if they haven't written a review for that book yet.
Make sure to add a "date of publication" when creating your title. If that date is in the future, authors who review your title will receive an email on that date letting them know that the title has been published.
According to the FTC, yes - reviewer must at least disclose in their review that they received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review.
For instance, they could say: "I received a review copy of this book at NovelReviewers.com in exchange for an honest review."
On your publisher dashboard, there is a section called the “My Book Reports.” By selecting a book from your account, you’ll be able to get a full list of who you have approved, who you have denied, the requests pending a review and the requests that have already resulted in a review for each book.
Is there anything else on your mind? We’d love to chat with you. Feel free to send us a request over on the contact page and we’ll connect with you!