When launching a book on Amazon, it is critical to get reviews. When you launch your book is quite helpful to have at least 5-10 reviews already showing up ahead of time. That will make your launch so much better when you go live with your book in the Kindle store of Amazon.
Reviews
Amazon’s algorithm has to do with reviews. It’s weighted into their algorithm. So how to use that algorithm to get 5-star reviews on your book in a few weeks? You can start with your own network. You can give out your book for free as part of the free promotion you can do and then get a bunch of friends to leave a 5-star rating & review.
You can say something like this to your friends: “Once you read this, and I give the book to you for free, I would appreciate it if you could leave an honest review on Amazon”. When you sign up for Kindle, they let you have 5 free days. You can start out your book promos by offering the book 5 days for free. The reason you would do this is, that you want to get a ton of downloads, reviews, etc. It also lets you populate for your keywords, and you start to increase this organic reach on Amazon which is crucial for the long term success of your book. Amazon actually gets behind your book, and email out on your behalf, and actually recommend your book in their newsletters. You’ll want to get as high ranking as possible during those free days because that really increases this organic reach once again.
Then you can get to the top of these categories easier.
Reach out
Tell your friends they don’t need to go above and beyond. They don't need to write this huge paragraph or like an essay about your book, they needn't spend a lot of time on writing the review. The only thing that matters to Amazon’s algorithm is this 5-star rating.
Really good and long reviews are great when people are searching for your book and reading through them. So reach out to all the same people in your network again and say: “Hey, would you mind leaving an honest review? You can actually even go in and edit it later, so don’t let it hold you back, because it’s really important that I get these reviews as fast as possible”.
The people who leave feedback will feel very involved in the process and will be the first people who share your stuff on Facebook. You can also ask them to leave you an Amazon review once you launch your book since they’ve already been involved at an early stage and they will feel that they’re part of the actual book launch.
Videos
Another strategy you can implement is to do 300 personal 30-second videos to all your friends. This is a little bit unhealthy, and a lot of hustle and hard work, though. Basically you will spend a very long time to reach out to all of your friends … you can do the maths yourself. After getting about sixty 5-star ratings & reviews in Amazon, the reviews will start to become more organic, and your book will go up in the Amazon search engine as well.
