If you love someone, write a review

Last month I posted on another blog about a very important topic. Today, I'd like to revive that post here.

I’d like to chat a bit about love. Love of a book, to be precise. We all can name at least one book we absolutely love, right? We’re all book lovers here, so I imagine that for most of you, favorite isn’t a title it’s a category. I have so many favorite books I couldn’t begin to name them all. I’m betting most of you are the same.

So let me ask, when you love a book so much that you can’t stop thinking about it and you have book hangover for days, what do you do about it? Do you tell everyone you know? Again, I bet a lot of you do. Some of you might even tweet the author or write him an email or like her Facebook page. But how many of you write a review? I’m not just talking about clicking 5 stars on Amazon or Goodreads. I mean write a review with words and descriptions about exactly what you liked about the book.

I’m guessing most of you do not.

Until I started writing seriously, I never wrote reviews. It never occurred to me because who would even care about what I had to say?

Here’s the thing I didn’t know until recently when my writer friends started getting books published. I’m going to bold this because it’s the whole point of my post. Writing a review is the number one best way to tell an author you loved their book.

It’s not because writers are dying for validation and happy words written about them (though we do love that too). It’s because sites like Amazon and Barnes and Noble and Goodreads place books with more reviews more prominently on their website. In other words, a book with lots of reviews will be seen more (and probably purchased more) than a book with no reviews. For writers with a huge following, your little review might not make a bit of difference. But for newbies such as myself and even your average run of the mill authors who have been around awhile, your review can absolutely change how successful a book is. Even a three sentence review counts.

Maybe it seems crappy and greedy to talk about helping an author get sales, but the truth is, most authors do not make enough money to make a living at it. It’s a second job. For me, it’s a third job. For people like me, every sale counts. And the more reviews writers like me get, the more likely I’ll get seen. The more likely I’ll get a sale and I’ll get to keep writing for people like you.

For those of you who write reviews on a regular basis, THANK YOU! Thank you to all you bloggers who write reviews all the time. Thank you for making it possible for writers to continue giving you the words you love.

And for those of you who’ve never written a review, we authors love you too. For buying our books and telling your friends. But we’d also like to ask, if you really loved a book, please consider taking a moment to tell us by writing a review.