One of the most important aspects of any book promotion plan is finding reviewers. However, unless you’re a big publishing house, it can be incredibly difficult to attract reviewers..
Trawling Google for potential reviewers can be frustrating, as you won’t easily find blogs that are kept up to date. Mining reviewer directories can also be a time-consuming process, as you first have to find websites that are kept updated and then consider whether the site’s reviews are relevant to your publication.
Well, we’ve developed a free method that solves these problems and helps you find reviewers. Here’s what it will do:
- Find reviewers that have up to date websites/blogs/GoodReads pages
- Find reviewers that have reviewed books similar to yours
- Find reviewers that have a social media presence
- Automatically find reviewers for you; no need to trawl Google only to find old, irrelevant websites – everything is delivered to you.
Sounds good right? Here’s what you’ll need to make it work.
- An RSS reader, like Google Reader
- A list of books/authors similar to yours
Our method queries Twitter to find users that have tweeted reviews that mention books/authors similar to yours. Here’s how to build your query:
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=this%20is%20a%20query
So, you append your query to the following URL: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=
And if you need to insert a space, you use the ‘%20′ symbol. So if you wanted to look for tweets about Virginia Woolf, you’d type: virginia%20woolf. If you need help turning your query into something accepted by Twitter, just type your search term (‘book reviews’) into this free URL service and hit Encode. Next, copy the result from the Encoded box and add it to the search.twitter.com URL.
With your list of similar books/authors (if you’re not sure, you can just use authors/books that have influenced you), you can build a query for each one:
So, if you wanted to find Twitter users tweeting about Kurt Vonnegut reviews, here’s what you’d search for:
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=kurt%20vonnegut%20review
Or if you wanted to find reviews of Fifty Shades of Grey:
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=fifty%20shades%20of%20grey%20review
If you click on these URLs, you can see they lead to RSS feeds (they’re unreadable in their current form). Once you’ve created your custom Twitter search query, you need to subscribe to it in an RSS Reader. To do this, take the URL you’ve built and subscribe to it in an RSS reader:
You’ll then receive all updates for this query in your RSS reader. You’ll be able to view the entire tweet in your reader:
So you can easily extract the tweeting user or the URL they’re referring to. All results for your search will be stored by your reader, meaning you can follow-up at any time. This method of finding reviewers means you’ll have access to fresh, regularly updated websites.
You can also run a reviewer’s Twitter username through Klout for an understanding of their reach. Heck, you could even run these tweets through a free sentiment analysis engine and only contact the reviewers that loved books similar to yours.
In order to get the most from this search tool we recommend you build queries for at least 5+ similar books/authors. If you choose very obscure authors you may find it difficult to find reviewers, so do keep it broad.
As you’ll be keeping track of each potential reviewer with your RSS reader, you can also begin to understand just how close your similar authors/books are. For example, you may find that reviewers who rate Philip Roth highly also recommend your work, in which case you may want to find more Roth-friendly reviewers.
And that’s it! We’d love to know how you get on with this Twitter method for finding reviewers, so if you’ve utilised it, let us know.
Note: Sociable.co has a great article on Twitter and RSS feeds.
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