How to Get Free Books for Reviewing

Author Info

Updated: October 17, 2018

Writing reviews for online and print publications can be a great way to obtain free books to read. You'll be doing something you love, while at the same time helping out an author and their fans by telling them, in publication, how you like the book. Reviewing books can be a great hobby, some publications might even pay you for your work. Here's some helpful tips to get you started.


Method One of Three:
Start A Review Blog or Social Media Presence

  1. 1
    Create an online review presence.  Blogging is a great way to go, but social media groups can also be helpful.  You could even do both if you so choose.
  2. 2
    Be involved with the author community.  Follow authors across multiple social media platforms.
  3. 3
    Start the reviewing process by buying a couple books and reviewing them.  If you want to get free books, you need to invest a little bit in your work.  *Authors tend to give away free e-books on Twitter and Facebook, so keep your eyes peeled for those.
  4. 4
    Review books and SHARE your reviews on social media multiple times a day.  This helps reach a larger audience, especially if people are following more than 1,000 people on Twitter.
  5. 5
    Befriend authors on social media, and offer to review their books in exchange for free copies.  Sometimes it's okay to be blunt.  But you must have a good online presence before asking directly, otherwise authors will see you as a flake and reject your offer.
  6. 6
    When your reviews get a large number of views a day, authors you befriend will recognize this and come to you, offering a free copy for a review.
    Advertisement

Community Q&A

Ask a Question
200 characters left
Include your email address to get a message when this question is answered.
Submit
Advertisement

Warnings

  • Do not offer to review a book and then forget to review it. Authors will lash back.
    0 Helpful?  0
  • Do NOT give every book five stars (unless they truly deserve them). Your credibility will be questioned by readers and authors.
    0 Helpful?  0
Advertisement

About This Article

wikiHow is a “wiki,” similar to Wikipedia, which means that many of our articles are co-written by multiple authors. To create this article, volunteer authors worked to edit and improve it over time. This article has also been viewed 5,962 times.
9 votes - 89%
Co-authors: 7
Updated: October 17, 2018
Views: 5,962
Categories: Book Reviews

Reader Success Stories

  • CW

    C. West

    Mar 21, 2016

    "Thanks for the hashtags to search on Twitter. I'm just starting out reviewing books on my blog, so I'll find out if I'm any good at it. Thanks for the tip to both practice and not approach authors until a good reputation is reached."..." more
Share your story

Did this article help you?

Yes
No
Advertisement
https://m.wikihow.com/Get-Free-Books-for-Reviewing
m.wikihow.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-35
140128
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:F65SPVUAV4RX5UP5LNBFUYRCWWFOMILH
<urn:uuid:50f37ea6-465f-4eac-8700-eb3d9faa1eaf>
2019-08-18T08:47:38Z
151.101.250.110
text/html
sha1:7INWNK7HEUSWQWTJBJFMRGLTV4U5SCPN
<urn:uuid:3304a0f8-1c75-4ca3-a523-a8c2fb51c333>
https://m.wikihow.com/Get-Free-Books-for-Reviewing
response
<urn:uuid:c9239ab9-a6ec-4895-acf7-c9bd5e8d2763>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-35
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-85.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/