Once you’ve published a book, one way to generate sales is to obtain positive book reviews on sites like Amazon.com and Goodreads. Not just any review will do, however. You want reviews that are meaningful, written by people who actually read and were interested in your book (Usually readers can tell when a reviewer isn’t genuine.). You also want a lot of reviews, for the more they are, the more likely they are to generate sales.

One to generate those reviews is to hold a contest.

A currently trendy contest among self-published authors – probably gaining traction because of sites like Story Cartel – enters readers who write a review of your book into a drawing for a free ereader (typically a Kindle). Readers can download your book either for free from a specific site or must make a verified purchased of the book before their review qualifies them as an entrant.

To make this contest work, you’ll need to do some promotional work. Start by posting a blog entry a about the contest a couple of days before it begins and then send links to the entry via your social media platforms, such as Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and so on.

Some authors have reported up to a hundred reviews added to their sites via this effort. Of course, the downside is that some reviews – because they are honest – may be negative (But that also can be a good thing!).

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.