Are book review blogs effective?

Arpeggio said:

I'm interested to know how many you contacted to get that response? I'm glad it worked for you.

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I went through about 200-300 blogs for the short story collection. 4 were open to short story collections, though mostly did novels. 0 replied. 0 reviewed it. The reason I went through so many blogs was the vague hope I'd find something if I kept looking.

I went through about 50 blogs for the novel. I sent a request to 31 (usual reason for not sending was they didn't take self-published work). 3 said yes. 2 reviewed it after a few months. 1 went inactive, so didn't review it.

Also there is the issue of diminishing returns. You can find the first 50 blogs pretty easily if you know your genre and follow the blogrolls of blogs you like. These are also likely to be bigger and better known blogs. But to get to 200-300 is a lot slower, because it gets harder and harder to find blogs. Hence it was much faster checking and sending requests for the novel than the fruitless short story search. I don't think it's worth scratching around for blogs after the initial ones, as the time taken finding Bob's Obscure Book Blog isn't worth the return.

ResearchGuy said:

Interesting. As a reader/book-buyer I never pay any attention to reviewer rank. And I look for the outliers as well as the preponderance. Some one-star reviews of a book with a ton of five-stars often tell me more than the five-stars, and vice versa.

--Ken

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I agree with this.

I do not pay attention to blogs that review books because I've seen too many where the review was absolutely glowing, and then I read a sample of the book and it was awful, with grammatical errors, typos, misuse of vocabulary, etc. It ruined the credibility of most review blogs, for me. I'm not saying I would NEVER believe what a blog said about a book, but the book would have to stand on its own, in other words, there would have to be corroborating evidence in the form of a solid reputation behind the person writing the blog, or the ability to preview the book beforehand.

What do you mean by 'lots of book reviewers'?

Biased? I would hardly expect any other response from the folk who prepare blog reviews - if they were the folk you asked - whether they're charged for or not.

Surely the effectiveness of blog reviews can only be determined based upon the buyers of books stating whether or not they bought a book as a direct result of reading the blogged review and without that data from a large number of purchasers it is not possible to do other than guess at the answer.

A small increase in sales following a blogged review doesn't seem valid proof of a blogged review's effectiveness and sales could be caused by any number of other factors.

I wish you well in your research.

ogaden said:

Hello again all. Original OP here.

To answer this question, I thought I would ask book reviewers directly! I emailed lots of book reviewers and 89 were kind enough to respond to my survey.

I will do a more in-depth reply soon and blog about it.

The response might be a little biased. ;-)

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Well, just to state the obvious: the blog has got to be popular to some extent at least. Otherwise, what's the point? Popularity can be judged in part by the number of comments left on blogs. If there are none, say "later."

Blogs are big in YA. I discovered the self-published novel ANGELFALL via the Midnight Garden, and I don't think I was alone. I've heard of other YA and NA books getting a significant boost when popular bloggers championed them. Those bloggers tend to be popular on Goodreads and so show up on the first page of reviews.

For literary novels, I read the NYT Book Review and the like. But those publications don't cover much YA, or when they do, the reviewers may not be able to place it in genre context. Publications for librarians also approach children's lit very differently than bloggers tend to do, with more emphasis on educational content.

Bloggers generally take a more irreverent approach and use teen-friendly humor and GIFs and the like, and sometimes get involved in entertaining feuds and drama. So, in short, I don't know how many teens actually read book blogs, but I think they'd be more likely to seek book recs there than in established media.

I would say overall, no. If someone wanted to review mine, I would let them without a second thought but I have never consulted a blog before deciding on whether to read a book or not. Reviews on Amazon and GR are a different story and usually heavily weigh on my decisions.

jmichaelfavreau said:

I would say overall, no. If someone wanted to review mine, I would let them without a second thought but I have never consulted a blog before deciding on whether to read a book or not. Reviews on Amazon and GR are a different story and usually heavily weigh on my decisions.

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Most review blogs I've come across will crosspost to at least Amazon or Goodreads. If not both and other book social networks too.

Polenth said:

I went through about 200-300 blogs for the short story collection. 4 were open to short story collections, though mostly did novels. 0 replied. 0 reviewed it. The reason I went through so many blogs was the vague hope I'd find something if I kept looking.

I went through about 50 blogs for the novel. I sent a request to 31 (usual reason for not sending was they didn't take self-published work). 3 said yes. 2 reviewed it after a few months. 1 went inactive, so didn't review it.

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Thanks for the info. Sounds pretty hard!

ogaden said:

The response might be a little biased. ;-)

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You would have thought so but the result of 76% is close-ish to the larger studies such as Nielsens that got 70% when asking customers regarding online customer reviews.

ogaden and Bufty, that image is mahoosive. We have a maximum allowed image size at AW of 400 x 400 pixels: could you both please either reduce the size of that image from your posts, or delete them? Thanks.

Done. The OP doesn't seem to have been back since posting that post.

Old Hack said:

ogaden and Bufty, that image is mahoosive. We have a maximum allowed image size at AW of 400 x 400 pixels: could you both please either reduce the size of that image from your posts, or delete them? Thanks.

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I've had a mixed response. My YA horror novel received some great reviews on four different book blogs, leading to less than a half-dozen sales. My collection of three SF stories sold a thousand copies after one book blogger's review. Unfortunately, Sift Book Reviews went away back in May of 2013... and so did my sales.

I will just chime in as a reader who uses book blogs for discovery and has frequently bought trade published and self pubbed books as a result. Admittedly, I am more likely to get the trade published ones from major publishers from the library as a result, so this applies mostly to self pubbed and small online press books.

Again, YA, which seems to be a theme here.

Before I was published, I relied on word-of-mouth and bookstore browsing to find my reading material. I didn't know book blogs existed until I was published and started looking for outlets to promote my work.

These days, I subscribe to multiple blogs which post reviews and lists of upcoming/recently published books in the genres I like to read (and one or two in genres I don't care for because the bloggers are entertaining). I have bought many books based off those lists. Once in a blue moon, I will buy one because of the reviews. I still value personal recommendations over lists and reviews.

Sometimes I'll buy one because of all the chatter about it on Twitter and FB (ANGELFALL and Karen Marie Moning's Fever series are good examples of this--the stories were fabulous and I can see why so many readers/bloggers were talking about them).

Never underestimate the power of the book blogger review. Some of my most avid fans who consistently talk up my books (both online and to their friends at conventions or book clubs) are blogger friends who I still have a relationship with to this day, even though some of them aren't blogging anymore. I also have quite a few fans who have followed me because of the guest posts I used to do for bloggers.

What doesn't work is buying a book blog tour where you don't offer anything but a sample of your work or just a book cover or a little "blah-blah-blah" about you. Give the readers of the blog something to think about or something to engage them. Guest posts that entertain (not just hawk you, your writing process, or your book, such as cover reveals or "where you came up with the idea for _____," that sort of thing) and are on blogs that engage their followers are a great way to draw in new readers. The trick is to come up with short and sweet articles readers will want to read and has some relevance to what you write.

Personally, I started skimming a lot of guest posts in the last couple of years because they felt like rehashes of things I had already read or like they were one big ad instead of an entertaining preview of what the author's work would be like.

There was some information about this subject from a popular YA blogger's informal survey of their readers in early 2014, along with the conversation that carried on in the comments, that you might find of interest.

I'm currently contacting book reviewer blogs, but it's not just for their reviews on the actual blog. It seems like most of these reviewers will also post them on Goodreads and Amazon, and that, IMO, is what's most important. Their blog is kind of like the sprinkles . . . getting a few additional interests by their readers.