After checking out some sites that offer “free” reviews for self-published authors…
It seems that most of them are offering this service for free + a modest fee if you want the review in a reasonable amount of time (if at all!). Most of the fees range from $50-300 with various perks increasing as the dollar amount increased. I checked the previous books to use this service on Amazon and others, and it did not seem that it majorly impacted their sales or reviews (based on sales rank). From this few hours of research, I’ve decided that these “free” review websites are not really worth it.
Some unresolved issues: A lot of these sites don’t even post their reviews that they put up on their blog onto Amazon.com for review where the product is sold. That is a disservice to the author who probably is paying for the review. For the fee, you get exposure on the blogger’s website, but I did not see a noticeable improvement in exposure based on reviews and sales rank. This is not the best way to judge admittedly though since I don’t know if sales went up.
Some of the sites I looked at linked from the blogs were not even up anymore.
Please leave a comment if you’ve had a different experience or advice on this.
Conclusion: I’ll keep looking for other methods.
Rian K Davis 