Book Review Form 3.0

Changes to the form

Those of you who have been members of our review crew for a while will notice that some things aren't listed on the form. I'm not worried about book synopsis, genre, and maturity. I've either been ignoring them or rarely using them as I can get the info from the Amazon page.

The biggest change, though, is that I don't want you to submit the wording of the review anymore. The new way will improve our processing speed (since it took a while to format a post using the old way), allowing us to accept more reviews, manage more reviewers and thus helping more authors in the long run.

Instead of giving me the wording of your review on the form, we are requiring a link to your review on Amazon. A review on Amazon.com is the most beneficial for authors (among other reasons since those reviews may also appear on the other Amazons), so that would be the preferred place to put it. However, I realize that if you live in another country, it may be very difficult to have an Amazon.com account. So, any Amazon review will do.

Although you are more than welcome to put your review on your blog, Facebook, or just about anywhere else, please do not give us those links. The reason I want you to put the review on Amazon is that it's a good service for the authors. I've seen bloggers that don't post reviews to Amazon, and I personally would never use them for that reason.

In my opinion, it looks bad on the reviewer if they don't post to Amazon, arguably the number one retailer of ebooks, the only one I currently support 100% of the time. Few blogs, including this one, have the power to propel a review farther than it would go by simply being listed on Amazon. In other words, it's a step that cannot be missed if a blog/reviewer wants to maintain their professional appearance.

We've done as well as we could to ensure reviews are posted to Amazon using the old form, but from this point on, it will be an actual requirement, not just a strong recommendation.

There is a distinct advantage to the new way. In the past we've limited how many people can read the same book. One of the biggest reasons for this was that it was harder to get multiple reviews on Amazon posted since we posted at least one review on my personal Amazon account.

That won't be a limitation anymore. If everyone wants to read the same book, that's OK with me. Everyone will be posting their own reviews to Amazon, so we won't have any issues there.

Another advantage is that I won't discourage long reviews. Though I haven't done so recently, I have discouraged long reviews in the past. Long reviews on the old form took an incredibly long time to process. That won't be a problem anymore. My frustration may have been mostly hidden, but it was there all the same.