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Guest post by Dana Lynn Smith of The Savvy Book Marketer

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One of the most effective ways to help out an author is to write an endorsement, testimonial or review for their book. Here’s a brief description of each:

• Authors usually request endorsements (recommendations) from key influencers in their field or genre prior to publication and use these on the book cover, inside the book and on promotional materials.
• Testimonials are words of praise from readers who enjoyed a book and want to recommend it to others.
• Reviews are a little longer than testimonials and usually include more information about the content of the book and what the reviewer liked (or disliked) about it. Reviews can come from readers, colleagues, or professional book reviewers.

You can post your testimonials or reviews in online bookstores, on virtual reader communities like Goodreads and LibraryThing, or on your own blog if the book’s topic is a good fit for your audience. You can also post brief testimonials on social sites like Facebook and Twitter.

It’s important for reviews to sound authentic. One way to do that is to mention something specific that you liked about the book, or share a tip from a nonfiction book. If you are not sure quite what to say when writing a book review, study some good reviews for similar types of books and read this helpful article about how to write a book review by Nick Daws.

In addition to helping the authors of the books you review, you can gain exposure for yourself and your own books by doing reviews of books that appeal to your target audience. Novelists can review books in the same genre as their own, and nonfiction authors can review books that are similar, but not direct competitors of their own books. Here are some benefits of doing book reviews:

• Authors may promote your review on their social networks or blog, giving you exposure, or agree to review your book in return.
• Posting reviews on online bookstores like Amazon gives you visibility directly where people are shopping for books similar to yours.
• A book review that has been keyword optimized may attract visitors to your blog through online searches.
• You can even earn money from your book reviews by signing up for the author’s affiliate program (if they have one) or joining the Amazon Associates affiliate program.

When reviewing books, it’s important to avoid the appearance of being overtly promotional,

In our last installment, I noted that the increasingly common spelling of minuscule as miniscule is not just your average typographical error: it makes sense in a new way, since the respelling brings the word into line with miniature, minimum, and a whole host of tiny terms using the mini- prefix. It might not be correct from an etymological standpoint, since the original word is historically related to minus instead of mini-, but most users of English don’t walk around with accurate, in-depth etymologies in their heads. (Sorry, Anatoly!) Rather, we’re constantly remaking the language by using the tools at our disposal, very often by comparing words and phrases to other ones we already know. If something in the lexicon seems a bit murky, we may try to make it clearer by bringing it into line with our familiar vocabulary. This is especially true with idioms, those quirky expressions that linger in the language despite not making much sense on a word-by-word basis. (more…)

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