I left a quickie anonymous comment earlier. I thought I'd provide a little more detail, so people can understand why I'm not so sure that free review copies are a great investment.

So. You contact bloggers who review books in your genre and have a reasonable readership. The really big bloggers ignore you, since they're busy reviewing books from the big publishers, but some of the B-list and C-list bloggers would like to review your book. You send them all copies. You're doing it right, so let's say you send out fifty copies.

Half of them never read it. The book ends up in a local bookstore, probably sold on Amazon and B&N as one of those copies available "new and used." And that one's new. And it'll be selling for less than the retail price, or even the discounted prices of the major online vendors.

The others do read it. Your book is great, so most of them rave about it. Some are lukewarm. A few dislike it. Let's say that's fifteen five-star reviews, eight four-star reviews, and two three-or-lower. Wow, those are some awesome reviews. And they crosspost them to LibraryThing, Amazon, LivingSocial, and lots of other places in addition to their blogs. So all the readers will go buy it, right?

Nope. There will be a flurry of comments saying that it sounds sooooo good and--that they're putting it on their wish lists. Or that maybe they'll check it out of the library. Or that they plan to ask for their own ARC. :\

Sales? Maybe one. Two, if you're lucky. Quite possibly zero. Definitely not enough to cover the cost of the twenty-five review copies which actually got reviewed, never mind the other ones. The question of profit doesn't even arise.

It may be worth noting that, in the early days of book blogging, big publishing houses gave away advance copies quite liberally. You could have an ARC for the asking, sometimes literally. Even before the disaster that was October of 2008, this river had gradually slowed to a stream. Now it's a trickle at best. The big publishers did take note of this, tried it, and found that it didn't work too well.

Now I've found the same thing. Even when the reviewers are swooning, it's a money-losing proposition. For a review copy to be a worthwhile investment, that reviewer must reach a number of readers large enough to produce at least three or four actual sales, and that probably means three or four thousand readers. If you work with smaller readerships, you'll be sending out twenty (or more!) review copies to reach those few thousand readers and make those few sales. You're digging a financial hole.

Don't believe me? Check out the Amazon page:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0615255639/

The professional blurbs are great. The reader reviews are great. The sales rank is dismal.

You can buy word of mouth, sort of, if you have a good product to start with. You can buy it by giving away free copies that people will talk about. You just can't buy enough of it to offset the cost, because it costs more than it brings in.

The positive reviews are nice, though. They're nice to read, of course. We all like to be liked.  

It may have some long-term effect, in that any future possible reader searching for reviews of your book will find many. They'll have to become aware of the book via some other channel, though, because book blogs and book-oriented social sites aren't going to do the job.

People forgot the point of reviews. You want people to hear about your book, be interested enough to go get it, and buy it.

So I've been a little confused by the resistance to things like community reviews and blog reviews and things like that. This isn't to devalue the larger review sources. They can be very valuable for a lot of things. Especially library sales. But if a review gets new readers who haven't heard of your book interested in it and causes them to buy, then it has done it's job.

I'm excited about all the opportunities to grassroots market my work, including these community based review boards and blogs. I could never have enough time to take advantage of every opportunity out there to market my work, which is very exciting.

I don't think I'll ever be twiddling my thumbs going: "Oh man, I ran out of places to market."

I'm a book reviewer that posts to my blog and to a dozen other sites around the web, including Library Thing and Good Reads. These communities are growing by leaps and bounds and those publishers who take advantage of it and establish more personal relationships with their readers are definitely going to see an advantage. Newer networks like Book Blogs on the Ning social network, as well as more than a dozen others revolving around books and writers are flourishing. Mainstream publishers would be smart to start maintaining and active presence in these groups.