The platform

Reviews are earned or they are a liability.

A book with no reviews is hard to sell. A book with bought reviews is a book that can be delisted. There is a legitimate way to do this, and it is worth understanding before anybody sells you the other one.

How it works

Four rules
we do not bend.

An advance reader copy is a finished book sent out before publication to people who might write about it. Everything that makes it legitimate is in the detail.

  • Nobody is paid for a review

    Not in money, not in vouchers, not in a free book conditional on writing one. The copy is given whether or not they review it, and that is the line.

  • Readers are matched to the book

    People who read your genre by choice. Sending a literary memoir to a thriller list produces two-star reviews from readers who were never going to like it, which is worse than silence.

  • The disclosure is made

    Reviewers are asked to say they received an advance copy. It is required in most places, it costs nothing, and readers trust a disclosed review more than an anonymous one.

  • Nothing is guaranteed

    Not the number of reviews, not the ratings, not the timing. Anybody quoting you a number of reviews is describing something no honest programme can deliver.

Why the shortcut
is the expensive one.

Paid reviews are sold openly, they are cheap, and they work until they do not. Retailers detect them by pattern rather than by content — clusters arriving together, accounts that review nothing else, phrasing that repeats — and the consequences fall on the book, not on the seller who supplied them.

The outcomes run from reviews being silently removed to a title being pulled from sale and an account closed. There is no appeal worth the name. An author who has paid for a book to be made and then loses the listing has lost the whole thing to save a few weeks.

What that means for you as a buyer

If a marketing package quotes a number of reviews, ask exactly how they will be obtained. There is no honest answer to that question that produces a number in advance. That single question separates the services worth buying from the ones that put your book at risk.

Where reviews actually come from

Readers who finished the book. Everything on this page is about increasing how many of those there are and how easy it is for them to say so: a copy in the right hands, a reminder at the right moment, and a book worth writing about.

A hand marking up a printed typescript with a red pen, corrections in the margin.
How it goes

Before
publication day.

  1. 01

    The copy is prepared

    A clean advance edition, clearly marked as one, in the format readers actually want to read it in.

  2. 02

    Readers are found and matched

    By genre and by reading history, through reviewer communities and through your own audience — which is very often the better half of the list.

  3. 03

    It goes out early enough to matter

    Weeks before publication, not days. A review that lands on launch day is worth several that arrive a month later.

  4. 04

    You are told what happened

    How many went out, how many wrote something, and where. Reported afterwards, never promised in advance.

What our authors say

Ours, on platforms we do not own. Which is the same standard we hold your book's reviews to.

See all our reviews on Trustpilot

Our authors are seen on

BBCDigital JournalIrish Daily MailThe Yorkshire PostWashington City PaperThe Chronicle Journal

Review
questions.

We will not give you a number, because nobody can. What we will tell you is how many copies go out and to whom, and then what actually happened.

When is publication day?

If it is more than a month away there is time to do this properly. If it has passed, there are still things worth doing.

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