The good news is that the legitimate routes are well established and none of them require you to know anyone. The bad news is that a lot of the advice circulating online will get your listing removed, and authors rarely find out which advice was the bad kind until it happens. So this guide starts with the rules, then covers where reviews actually come from, and finishes with the part nobody warns you about, which is what a bad one feels like.
What reviews are actually doing
Reviews do two separate jobs, and understanding which one you are working on changes where you spend your effort.
The first is persuasion. A human being is on your page, undecided. Reviews tell them that other people took the risk and were glad. What matters here is not the average star rating so much as the volume and the specificity. Three detailed reviews that describe what kind of book this is will convert better than twenty that say "loved it", because a specific review helps the reader work out whether the book is for them.
The second is mechanical. Retailer systems treat review activity as one signal among many that a title is worth showing to more people. A book that accumulates reviews steadily looks alive; one that stopped at four does not.
Both jobs argue for the same thing: a steady supply of honest reviews from people who genuinely read your genre, starting before publication and continuing long after. Neither is helped by a burst of five-star reviews from people who did not read the book, which is the shortcut every author is eventually offered.
The rules, first, because they are strict
Retailers police reviews harder than authors expect, and the consequences fall on the author rather than the reviewer. In the worst cases a listing is removed entirely.
Four things are prohibited across the major platforms. You may not pay anyone for a review, directly or through a service that sells them. You may not offer anything of value in exchange for a positive review, which includes gift cards, entry to a draw, or a free copy conditional on the rating. You may not trade reviews with another author, even informally, because the platforms can see the reciprocal pattern. And you may not have reviews posted by people connected to you, which the systems detect more often than authors believe.
Two things that look similar are entirely fine. Giving away a free copy in exchange for an honest review, with no requirement about what it says, is the foundation of the whole advance reader system and is explicitly permitted. And paid editorial review services, where a publication charges a fee to consider a book and publishes whatever verdict its reviewer reaches, are legitimate, because you are buying consideration rather than an opinion.
The distinction is control. If you can influence what the review says, it is not allowed. If you can only influence whether the book is read, it is.
Advance reader copies, the main route
An advance reader copy is a finished, proofread version of your book sent free to readers before publication. There is no obligation attached beyond an invitation to review honestly if they want to. This is where most reviews on most independent books come from.
The word finished matters. Sending an unproofed draft to thirty readers produces thirty reviews mentioning typos, and those reviews do not disappear when you fix the file.
Aim for at least thirty committed readers for a debut and fifty or more if you have published before. Expect a fraction to follow through, because life happens and free books are easy to accept. A good response rate is somewhere around a third, so the number you recruit and the number who post are very different figures.
Send copies eight to ten weeks before publication. That is genuinely the least time a reader needs to finish a book and write something considered about it.
Where the readers come from
Your mailing list is the first and best source, because those people already chose to hear from you. Ask there before you ask anywhere else.
Beyond that, there are reader communities in every genre, on Goodreads and elsewhere, where readers actively look for advance copies. There are dedicated ARC platforms such as BookSirens and Booksprout, which match books to readers who have asked for that genre, typically for a small per-title fee plus a charge per reader who downloads, in the region of ten dollars a title as of 2026. NetGalley works similarly and is taken more seriously by librarians and booksellers, at a higher price point.
Book bloggers and reviewers who explicitly state that they accept review copies are worth approaching individually. The ones who do not say so are not worth approaching at all.
How to ask
The ask matters more than the channel. A short, specific message that shows you know what this person reads will outperform a mass mailing by a wide margin. Name the book, name two comparable titles so they can judge the fit, say what the deadline is, and make refusing easy and free of guilt.
Then follow up once, close to publication, with a specific request: please post on publication day rather than before it, because concentrating reviews into a few days does more for the book than spreading them across two months. One follow up is service. Three is harassment, and readers talk to each other.
Trade and editorial reviews
Trade reviews are a different animal. Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Booklist are read by librarians, booksellers and rights buyers rather than by ordinary readers, and a positive one is a quotable credential you will use for years.
They have two hard requirements. They need roughly three to four months of notice, and they will not consider a book that has already been published. Miss the window and the door is closed permanently for that title. They also generally want a printed galley rather than a file, which means budgeting for a short print run months before publication.
The traditional programs are free to submit to and highly selective. Several of these houses also run paid services for independent authors, where a fee buys consideration and a review is written whatever the verdict turns out to be. Kirkus runs one, and Publishers Weekly operates BookLife. These are legitimate and can be worth it for nonfiction with a professional audience or for anything aimed at libraries. They are rarely worth it for genre fiction, where readers do not read trade publications and the money buys more as advertising.
Be clear-eyed about the risk. A paid editorial review can be unfavourable, and you will have paid for it either way. Read a few of the service's recent reviews in your genre before deciding.
Keeping reviews coming after launch
Most authors treat reviews as a launch task and stop asking afterward. This is the largest missed opportunity in the whole subject, because a book accumulating reviews in month six looks healthier to both readers and retailers than one frozen at its launch total.
Three things keep them arriving. Put a short, polite request in the back matter of the book itself, where a reader who has just finished and is feeling warm toward you will see it. One or two sentences, no guilt, no link that breaks in six months. Ask your mailing list occasionally, not as a campaign but as an aside when there is other news. And answer readers who write to you, because a reader who has had a reply from an author is markedly more likely to post something.
If you are running any kind of promotion, the reviews that follow a price drop are free evidence for the next promotion. Our guide to launching a book covers how the sixty days after publication compound, and reviews are the clearest example of it.
What to do about a bad review
You will get one. Everyone does, including the books you love most, and a listing with nothing but five-star reviews reads as suspicious rather than impressive.
The rule is simple and absolute: do not respond. Not to correct a factual error, not to thank them for the criticism, not to explain what you were attempting. Every author who has broken this rule has made it worse, and some have made it famous. The review is not addressed to you. It is one reader talking to other readers, and you are not part of that conversation.
What you can do is read it a week later, when it stops stinging, and ask whether the same complaint appears more than once. A single reader who found the middle slow is a taste difference. Six of them are data, and data is worth having before the next book.
Frequently asked questions
How many reviews does a book need?
Can I pay for book reviews?
Can I ask friends and family to review my book?
What is the difference between an ARC reader and a beta reader?
Why did Amazon remove my review?
How do I get reviews for a book that is already published?
Where to go from here
Reviews are one part of a listing that has to work as a whole, and the cover and description do more of the persuading than most authors realize. Our guide to marketing a book covers the three things that have to be right before any promotion pays, and the marketing library has the rest.
If the outreach is the part you would rather not do, we run review campaigns for our authors, including the trade submissions with the long lead times that are easy to miss and impossible to redo.