When you put blood, sweat, and tears into writing, publishing, and promoting your book, receiving even one negative review can be crushing. In addition to hurting your feelings, negative book reviews can also hurt your sales. Readers often assess books by the number of reviews the book has received, and its average star rating. Negative reviews can have a major impact on a reader’s decision to purchase your book. And a significant amount of negative reviews will almost ensure that all of your hard work leads to few sales.
Types of Negative Reviews
Every published writer, even the most established and renowned of authors, will receive at least negative reviews at some point in their career. While these reviews can range from legitimate to irrelevant, they all have the potential to negatively impact your book sales and credibility. Here are a few types of negative reviews you might encounter:
Irrelevant to Your Book
Irrelevant reviews come from customers who are dissatisfied with their purchasing experience rather than with the actual quality of book. This could be anything from a customer complaining that Amazon said the book was free then charged them for it to a customer detailing their struggle to download the book to their Kindle device. These reviews are especially frustrating because they have nothing to do with your book but hurt your book sales anyway.
Ranting Reviews
In the ranting review, the customer goes off on something thats loosely relevant to your book. The content of your book might go against their personal beliefs or politics. They might have a problem with your book’s genre, or swear words, or steamy scenes in bed, or that you switched points of view too often. The rant has less to do with quality of your writing and more to do with the choices you made while writing. Most people ignore rant reviews, but you still have to worry about losing sales because of these rants.
Misaligned Expectations Reviews
If your book does not meet the expectations set forth by its title, cover or book description, then you might get this type of negative review. For example, if your book description leads readers to expect your book will conform to romance genre conventions and then it does not, you might anger some of your readers. These reviews can be particularly harmful because they tell potential customers specific ways in which your book does not measure up. Worse still is that you can be clear in your book description and these misaligned expectations are the fault of the reader.
Legitimate Concern Reviews
These negative reviews are incredibly important because they are often approached with thoughtful criticism. They detail specific areas of concern that you can address to provide a better experience to your readers. Oftentimes the issue brought up are fixable such as formatting problems, editing issues, typos, a cliff hanger ending, etc. While negative reviews of any kind will have a negative influence on readers’ perception of your book, these reviews are the most helpful and can lead to meaningful changes.
Responding to Negative Reviews
Although negative book reviews are painful, it is important to handle them in a positive manner. Here are a few of the most effective ways to respond to negative book reviews:
Ignore Negative Reviews
While receiving a negative book review is certainly upsetting, the best thing you can do after reading one is to move on. Do not respond to or otherwise engage with the review, and do not ask your friends to engage with the review either. Commenting on negative book reviews should be avoided at all costs.
If you respond to the review, the response will actually make that negative review appear higher on your book’s detail page, which is the last thing you want to happen. Your best option when faced with a negative review is to ignore it and let it fizzle out and get buried within other, hopefully more positive, reviews.
Drown Out Negative Reviews
If you receive a negative review, instead of trying to respond to or dispute the review, you should focus your efforts on earning more positive reviews. If you gain a significant number of positive reviews, they will drown out and lessen the impact of the negative review. Make sure to mark positive reviews as helpful to make them stand out on your book’s detail page.
Here’s are three ways to get more reviews:
- Try including a book review request page at the end of your book to encourage readers to review your book as soon as they finish reading it.
- Another way to gain more reviews is to reach out to some of the top reviewers for books in your genre. To do find these reviewers, look for other books that are similar to your own and see if any top reviewers have rated them. Build a connection with those reviews and reach out to them asking for a review.
- One of the best ways to gain legitimate reviews is to reach out to your existing fan base. Do you have an email list or social media following? Chances are they have some sort of interest in you or your work. Send them a message or an email asking them to leave a review when they have finished reading your book.
Address Legitimate Concerns
Do you have some reviews voicing legitimate concerns? See if there are any ways in which you can address these concerns. You might need to rewrite your book description or fix typos and re-upload your book to KDP, but your readers will be better off thanks to these changes, and you will receive less negative reviews.
Report “Abusive” Reviews
If you receive a review that does not have a legitimate concern or criticism, you can click “report abuse” to show the issue to Amazon. For example, if a review says they had trouble purchasing the item on Amazon or if the review is about a different book entirely, then you should click “report abuse.”
Remember, this tool is only for reviews that are not relevant to your book, do not click “report abuse” just because you do not like what a reviewer has to say about your book.
Looking to promote your book? Try a book promotion from JustKindleBooks.com
