Step 1: Make Your Presence Known

Cats don't hide when they want something. No, they saunter in, head held high, and make their desires plainly known. Take a page from the feline playbook and put yourself out there. Join reader groups on Goodreads, Facebook and beyond. Comment on bookstagram posts. Engage in literary Twitter threads. Don't aggressively pounce on readers - gently insinuate yourself into their world. Once you've established a warm, purring presence, readers will be more inclined to check out and hopefully review your book.

Step 2: Show Some Leg (Or Book Cover)

Now that readers are aware of your existence, it's time to entice them with a peek of leg...or rather, a glimpse of your cover art. Just like cats know the power of flashing some fur to grab human attention, an eye-catching book cover paired with a tempting synopsis reels readers in. Share tempting snippets not just online but with print postcards featuring your art. Send advance review copies to bloggers and bookstagrammers. Give readers a look at what they're missing out on - and make sure your book is available wherever cats and readers roam.

Step 3: Bring Out the Catnip

What gets readers purring with joy? Scrumptious samples of course! Let them nibble the first chapter. Dangle a juicy excerpt that leaves them hungry for more. Even flash some peeks at the climactic conclusion - don't worry, cats can keep secrets. Just like cats go crazy for catnip, a tempting literary sample makes readers lose their minds with anticipation. Once you've left them deliriously rolling around in pages of your prose, they'll eagerly leave five-star reviews simply to get their next fix!

Step 4: Ask for a treat

Now comes the crucial step - asking readers for the ultimate cat treat, also known as a glowing review. Take inspiration from cats shamelessly begging for treats and attention. If your readers have enjoyed a sample, entice them to leave feedback by asking sweetly yet persistently - perhaps with a postcard or email reminder down the line. Purr and nudge them towards reviews sites or offer to feature their write-up on your own platforms. Remember, cats don't hesitate to meow repeatedly when they want something...and smart authors won't hesitate to politely request reviews either.

Step 5: Show Your Appreciation

Cats expect worship for even the smallest good deed. While readers may not demand the same adulation for leaving a review, that doesn't mean you shouldn't heap on the praise! Just like cats preen under affection, readers glow when their reviews receive recognition. Repost their feedback on social media. Send a thank you email or letter. At a book signing, announce a special shout out to early reviewers. Spin some cat-level flattery by telling them their golden words are going straight to the cover of your paperback edition. Dramatic? Perhaps. Effective? Absolutely.

Becoming a successful author requires a difficult combination of writing skill, general resilience, good fortune, and calculated marketing. That last requirement is often tricky, even for ambitious authors, because it isn’t easy to get that deeply involved in the commercialization of something that means so much to you personally.

But something has to give, and if you want your books to be widely read, you need to be willing to view them as products with value — and thus as items suitable for review. Now inundated with options about what to read (all the classics of the past digitized, and new works from across the world available online), today’s readers simply can’t keep up with fresh releases, and need ways to narrow them down.

That narrowing is achieved through the collation of opinions from authorities (such as the New York Times site pictured above) and peers (anonymous reviewers). Whichever way you look at it, reviews are key, and you need to be incentivizing them. Here’s why, and how you can do it:

You Need Feedback To Optimize Positioning

Trying to find objective quality in a book isn’t an advisable task, because one person’s work of genius is another person’s waste of time. Artistic products aren’t suitable for generic valuation and packaging like businesses that sell direct are. Consequently, if a new author becomes discouraged due to their first book being slated, it isn’t necessarily a result of their poor writing: it could simply be a matter of incorrect placement and presentation.

This is another reason why you need to get as many reviews as you can. Through looking beyond the simple ratings and digging deeper into why people like or dislike your work, you can derive some useful inferences about how you’ve been marketing it. This is something that the Kadaxis Amazon Research Service is perfect for.

Sometimes, it even turns out that an author’s view of the strengths of their work is wildly inaccurate: they might have intended to write a comedy but somehow ended up writing a character study, yet persisted in presenting it as a comedy because they never consciously acknowledged the pivot.

In such a case, a book that has been struggling to gain any traction and gathering poor (and confused) reviews might just need some superficial alterations. Change the cover, change the blurb, change the listed genre (or discard the concept of genre entirely), and all of a sudden you have a hit. If you don’t stay aware of what readers think about your work, you’ll likely miss such opportunities.

How To Incentivize Book Reviews

To serve as compelling social proof, and to help authors and publishers decide how to best position any given book for success, reviews are vitally important — but books don’t inevitably gather reviews. With less popular works, you need to encourage them. Here’s how to do it:

Enter your books into contests. It doesn’t matter whether you think you have any hope of winning. Simply submitting your books as candidates for contests can get you some free feedback from industry professionals who may well have some valuable ideas for how you can improve your writing or your presentation.
Suggest your books for roundups. Bloggers love to do listicles, and something akin to “8 Horror Books to Try This Halloween” is an easy sell. If you reach out to sites that do such content and ask them to consider including your books, you’ll get some reads.
Reach out to readers through social media. Assuming you’ve made some sales — or at least been able to distribute some copies somehow — you’ll have some readers out there in the online world. Unless each one of them has already provided a review (unlikely), you should be able to pick up some more through simply asking.
Offer a small reward. If you’re really not getting anywhere in general and you just want to know where you’re going wrong, think about offering a minor reward for reviewing your work. You could provide free copies, or coupons of some kind, or even signed merchandise.

Any one of these methods can prove successful, so try everything applicable and you should be able to start expanding your range of reviews.

Let’s briefly recap what we’ve looked at:

You need reviews to persuade people that your work is worth their time.
By reading reviews, you can identify opportunities to pivot your presentation.
You can get reviews by pitching your books, consulting readers, and offering rewards.

Get started right away, and use the information you collect to achieve greater success.

Victoria Greene is an ecommerce marketing expert and freelance writer who loves reading through book reviews to get different perspectives on stories. You can read more of her work at her blog Victoria Ecommerce.