I admit, I only started book blogging last August. I have been reviewing books for a year now. I am also in a few book blogging groups on Facebook, and I learned a lot from them. I have noticed a lot of posts from them these days, about how bad authors are at requesting a review. Even I stopped taking requests because it just got to be too much work. Authors forget we do this for free. So here are a few tips for authors.

1. Please please please ….read the bloggers blog! I can’t tell you how many times I see this complaint. Not only do they not read our blogs, but they don’t read our policy reviews. Everyone has different policies, but I think authors don’t realize that. For instance, I don’t read Christian novels, and I mentioned that in my policy review, but I still got requests (maybe they thought I’d make an exception for them?).

2. Please give a description of your book, not just ask us if we’d like to read it. I mean how do we know if we’d like it or not? I just never understood that concept?

3. Last but not least, if you can’t help share our blogs on your social media sites (though we share our reviews on all our sites), the least you could do is thank us. Like I said before, we do this for free, this is free advertising for you. But I only had 3 out of a dozen or so authors thank me. I just think it’s common courtesy, but apparently not.

Don’t get me wrong, we love to do this for you all. It just seems we are underappreciated these days. I even see people say that on Twitter. It just starts to feel like work for us. I had to take a break, because I have chronic health issues, and the extra stress wasn’t helping it. I can’t afford to work for free. Now, I just rely on the library to get free books. At least some of that is paid work, and the rest is just a hobby. I’m hoping that’ll change, but I wanted to let authors know that we’d love to help them, but it’s a give and take, seems like we do most of the giving. I know there are sites that charge authors for reviews, but with this economy, that is hard for authors to afford it. Trust me, I get it. I’m working on a novel, and I have no idea how I’ll afford to promote it.

I think if you follow those three suggestions then you’ll have better luck at getting more reviews for your books. That is one of the reasons why I love the writing community; we usually find ways to help each other instead of competing with each other. One more thing I should mention, make sure that you can send the right format to someone. I for one can only do Kindle or epub formats (or better yet a print or audiobook). It seems prints are harder to come by these days, so you should make sure the reviewer can use your format. Thanks for giving us books to read, and good luck to you all!