A book with two reviews looks abandoned. A book with thirty looks alive. The conversion difference between those two states is large, and it is the reason review count matters more than review score for a new author.
Here is where reviews actually come from, and the specific things that will get them deleted.
The single highest-yield thing you can do
Put a short, plain ask at the end of the book.
Two or three lines, after the last page, before the about-the-author. Not a plea. Something like: if you enjoyed this, a short review helps other readers find it, and it takes a minute.
This works because it reaches the only people guaranteed to have finished your book, at the exact moment they finished it. Most authors either omit it or bury it, and it converts better than every other tactic on this list.
Build an ARC team
An ARC is an advance review copy: the finished book sent to readers before release, so reviews appear in the first week rather than the third month.
Where to find them. Your newsletter list first. Then readers who reviewed the previous book. Then genre groups where advance copies are actively welcome, which is not all of them.
How many. Expect 20% to 40% of ARC readers to actually review. Twenty reviews at launch means recruiting around sixty people.
What to say. Be explicit that you want an honest review, that a negative one is fine, and that you are not paying for it. That framing is not just courtesy, it is what keeps the reviews compliant.
What to send. An EPUB or PDF, direct, with a simple deadline. If you built the book on BookZeta, the export formats give you both.
Reviewers, bloggers and newsletters
Slower, and still worth doing for the first book.
Book bloggers in your genre. Read their review policy before contacting them, because most have one and most authors ignore it. A personalized two-paragraph pitch that shows you have read the blog beats a hundred copy-pasted ones.
Goodreads. A separate ecosystem from Amazon, with its own reviewers and giveaways. Reviews there do not appear on Amazon, but they influence readers deciding what to buy.
BookBub and similar. Featured deals are competitive and expensive. Their real value for a new author is the follower mechanic rather than a featured slot.
Expect low response rates everywhere. This is normal and not about your book.
What breaks the rules
This is the part worth being careful about, because the penalties are severe and land on your account rather than the review.
Never pay for reviews. Not directly, not through a service, not through a "guaranteed reviews" package. Amazon detects these, removes them, and can close the account you sell through.
Never trade reviews with another author. Review swaps are detectable through account relationships and are explicitly against the rules. "I'll review yours if you review mine" is the most common way otherwise honest authors get their listing damaged.
Do not ask family or close friends. Amazon uses purchase, address and account signals to identify connected accounts, and those reviews get removed. Losing the review is the small problem; the flag on your account is the real one.
Do not offer anything in exchange. Not a gift card, not a free copy conditional on a positive review, not entry into a draw for reviewers. A free advance copy given with no expectation of a positive review is fine. A free copy given in exchange for a good review is not.
Do not review your own book under another account. People do this. It is the fastest way to lose a publishing account.
The clean version of all of this: you may ask anyone to review, you may give away copies freely, and you may not make anything conditional on the review's content.
Handling a bad review
Never respond. Not to correct a factual error, not politely, not once. Authors arguing with reviewers is a genre of internet content and it has ended careers. There is no version of this that goes well.
Do not organize a response. Asking your readers to downvote or report a negative review is worse than the review.
Read it once, then decide if it is data. One reviewer saying the middle drags is an opinion. Six saying it is a fact about your book, and it is free developmental feedback that you would otherwise pay for. How to revise a novel covers what to do with it.
A book with only five-star reviews looks suspicious to readers. A few threes and fours make the whole page more credible.
The pattern over time
Reviews accumulate for books that keep selling, and selling is mostly a function of the listing converting and there being a next book. The authors with hundreds of reviews rarely got them from a clever campaign. They got them from a series and several years.
For the launch mechanics around this, see how to sell your first 100 books, and for the platform rules themselves, Amazon KDP rules and requirements.
