Author Book Reviews:
Feral Cat Publishers is now facilitating free reviews for published, or nearly-published, books. We’re offering this service for several reasons. We hope to promote our FCP Review Standards more widely, as it puts objectivity back into reviews. As readers and potential buyers ourselves, most online reviews aren’t useful when making a buying decision. We’re hoping to change that. In addition, there are no end to the number of paid literary review services taking advantage of authors’ dreams and delivering marginal-to-no value. We can’t change that, but we can hopefully offer a better deal.
How it Works:
The review-seeking author will complete the sign-up form, including a brief synopsis of their book. FCP then circulates the details to their reviewer pool. If the book piques the interest of one of our reviewers, it is added to the book review queue and an ebook is requested from the author. Once the reviewer has finished the book, they will write a review (adhering to FCP Review Standards) on Amazon.com; the most useful reviews there are! The reviewer may post it elsewhere as well at their discretion. The current list of book reviews completed and some useful rating statistics are located here.
Sign Up Process:
To start the process, please complete the sign-up form. It is important to include a good synopsis of the book. Free reviews (e.g. author provides ebook file) will be published on a first-in/first-out basis. If you want to be considered as one of our reviewers, please contact us using the same form.
We’ll contact you via email to make the necessary arrangements.
Verified Purchase Option:
As a publisher, we have a certain amount of funding set aside for promotion and marketing. We’re interested in selling our books and you, as an author, are interested in selling your book(s). Therefore, if you purchase an eligible book in our catalog from Amazon, we’ll fund the purchase of your book on Amazon (up to a price of $4.99) by the reviewer. Furthermore, your book will skip to the front of our review queue. We’ll need a screenshot (or forwarded copy) of Amazon’s receipt email to establish proof of purchase.
In both cases, the paid purchase will boost sales rankings for the books. In addition, when our reviewer posts their review it will be with a “verified purchase” flag.
In this process, FCP loses a small amount of money on each transaction (Amazon’s cut of each sale). Therefore, the verified purchase program is limited to 20 reviews each month. If a month’s total is exceeded, the review slides into the next month in the order received.
Image by Jonny Lindner from Pixabay