I beg other authors not to hold it against me for reading and reviewing NAKED TRUTHS About Getting Book Reviews 2018 by Gisela Hausmann ahead of the schedule and before theirs. This book came at the right moment to my attention, when I was on the mission of seeking and hunting new reviews for A World Without Color, the true story of the last three days I spent with my cat, and I was too curious and hungry for good advice. And I got it!
It's not that I didn't ask around and collected information on what is allowed and what is not allowed when asking for a review and posting my own reviews on Amazon before I read this book. I did it by the book, not breaking any rules, which came as a relief.
In NAKED TRUTHS About Getting Book Reviews 2018, Gisela Hausmann reminded me of things I could have done better, more thoughtful and... more refined. As a "self-publishing industry veteran, an email evangelist and a top reviewer," as her Goodreads profile says, in her 86 pages long fourth edition (earlier editions were 2015, 2016 and 2017), she offers us her insight and knowledge on how to better understand Amazon's review platform and introduces us to 10 different kinds of reviews.
Spending years in collecting information and studying the shape-shifting of the patterns of Amazon's behavior to its readers and authors and as a response to the actions of its readers and authors, the Amazon top reviewer Gisela Hausmann delivered us a short but well-informed handbook of Amazon dos and don'ts.
I love this book. I love its simplicity of writing and the clarity of advice and examples Hausmann uses to tell us what we should do to get more reviews for our precious books. Like a good teacher or a caring parent she explains her every claim so everyone can understand it. Don't touch a heated oven or you might get burned, don't ride your bicycle over the red light or you might get hit by a car. Reward your teachers with a smile and thank you for the knowledge they gave you because they are also humans and kind words open many doors.
Apart from stating the rules in NAKED TRUTHS About Getting Book Reviews 2018 we should follow, should we want to make our books successful, Hausmann tells us probably the biggest secret of all on how to get desired reviews. I am sure we all know that secret on some basic, primal level, but we somehow forgot it in our rush to count our daily written words, haste to build our launch team or finish the formatting before we catch the self-imposed publishing deadline.
Every successful relationship is built individually, on respect and personal level, with just the right emotion and enough passion to spark it into existence. The same applies to our books and their reviewers, to us and how we treat them.
For further information please read the book.
BJ