Asking for a $20 Tip
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’m a big tipper.
If a server does a good job, I reward him/her with a big tip. Hey, I’ve never been a waiter but I do consider myself in the service industry . . . twice. My full-time job is in home care physical therapy. We serve patients. Customer care, the patient experience, is everything and very important to me. I’m also an author and serve readers with hopefully good stories and a positive experience. So I can empathize with servers. They have a tough job trying to please their customers.
For them to earn a big tip doesn’t mean they have to be infallible. Their service does not have to be perfect. I’m not overly demanding and my expectations are not overly high. I just want to have a comfortable, enjoyable experience.
A little while ago I read a book about marketing and the author talked about asking your readers for a $20 tip. That’s right, twenty bucks. Now before you assume where this is going and stop reading, let me explain.
Imagine yourself as a waiter or waitress. You do your best to serve each table, you stay attentive, fill their drinks, answer their questions, take their food back when it’s not hot enough or tastes funny. You bust your butt to make sure they’re having a nice time. Then they get up to leave and say, “Hey, thanks for the great time. You did an excellent job.” But there’s no tip.
Or imagine the same scenario, same thank you, but when you get back to the table there’s a $20 bill laying there.
The author of this book went on to say that the $20 tip you can give any author is a positive review on Amazon (and other sites). And surprisingly, those reviews mean more than you think they do, not only to the author but toward future awareness and sales.
So here’s my request, not just for me but for every author. If you read a book and enjoy it, if it moves you, excites you, entertains you, please do that author a favor and leave her a positive review on Amazon. Trust me, she’ll appreciate the $20 tip and it only costs you a few short minutes of your time.
Posted on March 28, 2013, in Book Reviews, Writing Life and tagged $20 tip, Amazon, Author, Book Reviews, Waiting staff. Bookmark the permalink. 7 Comments.
MIKE DELLOSSO 
A good idea.
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Mike, great analogy… I like this. I’m a bit like you as I love tipping.
I think another great thing readers can do is buy an extra copy of a writer’s book and pass it on.
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Yes! Or two or three! 🙂
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Whether I feel I can do a book justice or not I now always leave a review. Mike Dellosso and Peter Youngshusband thank you for making me aware of how important this is.
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It has been fun and rewarding encouraging you, Terry! I have not always left a review, due to a busy schedule and when this wins over my resolve to leave a review, I feel I have let the author down and also other potential readers. There was one author who graciously pardoned me for not having the time to write a review. This did not help my feeling about letting him down. What really got to me was that this was a new and emerging genre in Christian fiction, and any review would go far to help promote this genre and its authors. I loved this series he wrote so much but time dictated that I could not write a review. That is something I am going to work on. I want to write a review for all the books I read. I feel I owe it to the author and the genre, especially all the genres and authors in Christian fiction.. It is us readers who in one sense hold the balance of power to how successful or well known a book. author or genre is.
Readers need to realise that a review does not need to be literary masterpiece. There are reviewers who go into specifics like character development, plot development, writing style, pace, subject research etc. While this is good for the author and potential reader, it is not necessary to achieve what Mike has posted here. Sometimes what grabs me in deciding to buy a book is when a reader just writes:
WOW!! Fantastic, don’t miss this one, cannot put down, this author knows how to take you on a wild ride, etc.
That gets my reading juices going!! Yes, I enjoy the specifics I mentioned but those simple short descriptions just mentioned grab me first and get me excited about that book. The specifics, if they are there, then add layers of support to my first impression gained by these short descriptions.
And Mike, that guide to writing reviews that you posted last year is a very simple way to write a review. Maybe repost that here now?
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Peter, you are so right. I think a lot of readers get intimidated by writing a review because they think it needs to be a book report. It doesn’t. Like you said, a couple sentences is great and sometimes serves better to pique interest than a full-length review and critique.
I’ll repost the review guidelines in the near future 🙂
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