Okay to post book reviews on multiple sites?

jerrywaxler · Jun 24, 2008

I read lots of memoirs, and when I like one, I write an essay about it for my blog. But until now I have not been writing book reviews on Amazon or elsewhere. I'd like to start posting more book reviews, and to help me get motivated I have a few questions. I'm hoping folks on this forum might be able to answer.

If I post a book review on Amazon, they claim they own the copyright to my writing. (yuck.) Do you know if they are heavy handed about not letting me repost the same review elsewhere?

Do you think I would be breaking any other internet etiquette if I post a review on multiple sites?

Do you think posting book reviews about memoirs would generate much if any traffic for to my memoir blog?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts you have about how to use book reviews as part of my publicity strategy.

Best wishes,
Jerry Waxler

flashgordon · Jun 26, 2008

I don't know if posting book reviews on Amazon will generate a lot of traffic to your site - especially since you can't hot link anything in reviews. This is what I do:

I do a review for my site and let it sit there for about a week or so (so that the spiders find it and recognize that the original content is from my site - no duplicate content issues this way).

Then I put it on Amazon. At the bottom of my review I put in the name of my site and the URL in case someone wants to copy and paste it into their browser. (I'm not too worried about Amazon's claim of ownership - I've never seen or heard of them coming after anyone for doing this, and there are people who have done thousands of these.)

Next, I will put blurbs of the review on other relevant sites with a link at the bottom pointing back to the complete review. This is where you can build some backlinks and generate traffic.

Hope that helps.

PS: One thing you might want to consider is putting an anchor text around your link in your signature. This would be (a href="http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog")110 Essays about Memoir Reading and Writing(/a). Replace the ( with < and ) with >. This will make your anchor text associated with your link/website and help it rise in the search engines.

Okay to post book reviews on multiple sites?

jerrywaxler

flashgordon