Let’s make one thing clear. This is not me begging for reviews. Absolutely not. I’m simply standing outside your window with a boombox, making prolonged eye contact, wearing sexy lingerie under the rain, and reminding you that if you enjoyed my book, there’s a little button that says Write a Review.
No pressure.
Okay, maybe a tiny bit of pressure.
Here’s the thing: readers often imagine reviews are for other readers. They’re right. But they’re also for authors.
And if you’ve never written one before, let me tell you a secret. We read them. Every single one. Even the ones that are three paragraphs long.
So if you’ve ever finished a book and thought, I should probably leave a review, allow me to enthusiastically encourage that impulse before your attention is stolen by seventeen open tabs and a video of someone restoring a rusty frying pan.
Step one: tell me what turns you on (literarily, obviously)
Let’s skip the emotionally unavailable review that says, “Good book.” We deserve more than that. I spent months obsessing over commas, deleting entire chapters, and convincing fictional people to kiss each other at exactly the right moment. The least you can do is tell me which part made you lose your composure.
Was it the dialogue? The tension? The plot twist? The one sentence that made you close the book, stare at the ceiling, and whisper, “Well… damn.” Flattery is infinitely sexier when it comes with details.
Step two: confess your kinks
This is a judgment-free zone.
Did you stay up until three in the morning because you “just needed one more chapter”? Did you ignore your partner, your homework, your laundry, or the existence of time itself? Did you accidentally finish the entire book in one sitting and then blame me for being exhausted the next day?
Please include those details.
Nothing makes an author blush quite like discovering they’ve successfully ruined someone’s sleep schedule. If my book made you neglect your responsibilities for a few glorious hours, I’d call that a successful relationship.
Step three: tease, don’t tell
Reviews are foreplay for future readers.
You don’t reveal everything immediately. You build anticipation. You make people curious. You leave them wondering what on earth happened in Chapter 17 without actually saying what happened in Chapter 17.
Instead of spoiling the twist, tell them it permanently altered your brain chemistry. Instead of explaining the ending, admit you stared into space for twenty minutes afterward. Mystery is attractive. Spoilers are not. Keep a little something to the imagination.
Step four: tell me our safe word
Every author has that scene. The one we rewrote six times because we desperately wanted it to land. The one we quietly hoped readers would highlight. The one we secretly wondered might make someone laugh, cry, gasp, kick their feet, or immediately flip back and read it again.
If that’s the scene you can’t stop thinking about, tell us.
You don’t even have to quote it. A simple, “You knew exactly what you were doing with that chapter,” is enough to inflate my ego for at least a week. Possibly longer. I’m only human.
Step five: don’t play hard to get
I know what happens after people finish a book. They think, I’ll leave a review later. Later becomes tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes next week. Suddenly it’s six months later, and you’ve somehow convinced yourself the moment has passed.
It hasn’t.
Authors never look at a new review and think, Ugh, another person saying nice things about my book. We are embarrassingly easy to impress. Whether your review is twenty words or two hundred, whether you write it five minutes or five months after finishing the book, we’ll probably read it with the kind of excitement most people reserve for lottery tickets.
Step six: no more blue balls!
Hit “Post” before your inner critic starts editing your review into oblivion.
It doesn’t need to sound like a doctoral dissertation. It doesn’t need perfect grammar. It doesn’t need to impress strangers on the internet. It just needs to sound like you.
Tell me you laughed. Tell me you cried. Tell me you gasped so loudly your dog judged you. Tell me the slow burn was so slow it qualified as psychological warfare. Tell me you fell in love with someone who technically doesn’t exist.
Honestly, those are my favorite kinds of love stories anyway.
And if your review happens to make me smile like an idiot every time I think about it…
I’m not saying reviews are my love language. I’m just saying they’ve never hurt their chances.
— Montse
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