With so many social media venues to choose from, there seems to be a gray area on how an author should contact a book blogger for reviews. The preferred method of contact for most bloggers is via email. Our email addresses can be found on our blog page, along with a review policy that is also worth checking out!
Here are a few ways that don't work:
Twitter - sending a tweet asking for a review comes across as unprofessional and rather lazy.
Goodreads.com - We may not mind friending you as a author there, but please do not send us a book recommendation for YOUR book. As soon as that happens, you are no longer my friend.
Email - A little effort goes a long way. If you want us to pay attention to your request, don't start it off with a generic "Dear blogger" or even worse, the wrong name. A little personalization (I see you liked X so you may like Y) shows us you are truly interested in our opinion. Also, sending the same email again a month later is rather tacky.
Has this happened to you? What are your preferences? What do you consider the best way to be approached for a review?
About Author Mel Boulrice
I had a twitter pitch- only did it the 1 time but never again.
ReplyDeleteI have been going through my good reads to not follow authors any more
I agree wrong name or not having time is good way not to review the book.
Julie ~ thankfully I don't recall being twitter-pitched! I had to unfollow an annoying author once there, he drove ma absolutely batty!
ReplyDeleteI agree! I had an author contact me by Goodreads once but looking back it would've been a lot easier to keep track of everything if he'd simply sent me an email.
ReplyDeleteI'm really tired of independent or self-published authors going nuts because I once featured a self-published book. While I'm completely open to reviewing their books because I know there's some indie gems, I wish I received just as many from well-established or published authors too.
Besides the indie emails, I haven't really had any other offers on Twitter or Goodreads. A few authors attempted contact through bookblogs.ning.com, but I very rarely visit there now so it hasn't bothered me. I think my biggest pet peeve with this regard is an author sending a request that has grammatical errors all through the pitch (you know what I'm like!). If you want me to read your book word it professionally! I can understand ARC's having errors but the pitch?! Just a bad beginning to it all.
ReplyDeleteLaura ~ I can understand the grass roots approach new authors may need to use to get their book 'out there', my hope is that they will read this and learn how to do it more effectively :D
ReplyDeleteJackie ~ Oh yes, ning! I haven't been there is a while either. And yep, spelling or grammatical errors are a turn off too.
I'd prefer e-mail. I have everything organized there. If it's through goodreads/shelfari/etc I usually ignore. I don't have time to go through all the sites I'm a member of to find those types of messages.
ReplyDeleteEmail is the way to go!
I ignore pitches from publicists. I really only review from the Amazon Vine program and NetGalley and sometimes Sourcebooks. mostly I get email pitches for books that aren't anything I would read and obviously they don't check my blog to see that.
ReplyDelete