Book publisher Thomas Nelson has created a program - Book Sneeze - for bloggers worldwide who maybe interested in reviewing books.
The program works like this. You pick one of the books from their catalog and they will ship you a complimentary copy of that book for free. In return, you’ll have to post a review of that book on your blog and on Amazon.com or another online bookstore such as Barnes & Noble, Borders or Wal-Mart.
Once you are done with the review, you can keep that book and request another book to review from Thomas Nelson.
Most book publishers frequently get in touch with bloggers for writing book reviews but Book Sneeze takes an almost reverse route – here the blogger is contacting the publisher and anyone can figure out which blog has reviewed what title. That’s because the site maintains a public database of bloggers who are part of the book review program including the books that they have reviewed in the past.
Michael Hyatt of Thomas Nelson says that in addition to free books, bloggers also earn a link from the main site and that my pump up your Google rankings.
Such reviews don’t exactly fall in the category of “sponsored posts” as the blogger isn’t getting paid for the review but they’re still close because he still get to keep the product (in this case, books) after writing the “mandatory” review.
FTC guidelines aside, sign-up for the book review program only when you are sure that your loyal readership won’t mind reading such reviews on your site.
