New Reedsy book review service

[Ros]

I recently got sent a couple of emails from Reedsy inviting me to sign up as a book reviewer for them. It's not something I'd do - their offer wasn't good enough and I don't review regularly. It also looks like they're expecting readers to donate to reviewers to thank them - which I don't think will work.

But from the author marketing point of view it looks like they're setting up a book review section, focusing mainly on indie works.  It's paid, and at $50 a go I wouldn't. I'm curious about what others think of it. If they're asking me to review they're casting their net wide.

[Bill Hiatt]

It all comes down to how good the pool of reviewers is. I have no problem with an honestly run ARC service that adheres to Amazon TOS, but not every service manages to develop enough of a pool, and in some cases the reviewers don't take what they're doing very seriously.

[LilyBLily]

It all comes down to how good the pool of reviewers is. I have no problem with an honestly run ARC service that adheres to Amazon TOS, but not every service manages to develop enough of a pool, and in some cases the reviewers don't take what they're doing very seriously.

I do ask myself if "This book was easy to read" will encourage people to buy my books. An awful lot of the solicited reviews through agencies that follow Amazon TOS are crap.

Some people sign up so they never have to pay for a book. That's why I have a library card, so I guess I can't fault them for wanting free books. But I do fault them for posting 25-word reviews that could apply to almost anything ever written.

[Bill Hiatt]

It all comes down to how good the pool of reviewers is. I have no problem with an honestly run ARC service that adheres to Amazon TOS, but not every service manages to develop enough of a pool, and in some cases the reviewers don't take what they're doing very seriously.

I do ask myself if "This book was easy to read" will encourage people to buy my books. An awful lot of the solicited reviews through agencies that follow Amazon TOS are crap.

Some people sign up so they never have to pay for a book. That's why I have a library card, so I guess I can't fault them for wanting free books. But I do fault them for posting 25-word reviews that could apply to almost anything ever written.

I totally agree, but I have to say that a lot of my organic reviews read exactly the same way.

Rather than using examples from my books, I'll refer to a movie reviewer I've seen. He tends to do one or two sentence reviews, all of which that I've seen read something like "Garbage movie. Total waste of time." That's not useful to me, because I never know why he thought the movie was garbage. He is sometimes, right, but still...

The reality is that no matter how you obtain reviews, they will vary in quality. The bulk of them, both organic and otherwise, are probably not going to be that detailed. At least with an ethical review service, you'll end up with somewhat more of them.

[Tom Wood]

I've seen reviews that seemed like they were from some sort of organized review service. The reviewers left reviews for two or more books a day, and they were always short and repetitive. If you scrolled through some of these reviewers' Amazon pages, you start to see a pattern of the same indie books showing up across the same set of reviewers. If Amazon is fine with that, then so be it.

The trouble that I see is that if you use a review service, then your book(s) gets added to the also-boughts of all those reviewers. Since it's a review service, they are cranking out reviews for every genre of book. Isn't that going to mess up your also-boughts for your book(s) if you get lumped in with a bunch of reviews from all sorts of genres?