Guide
How to add an editorial review to your Amazon book page.
Six steps, about three minutes. Plus the paragraph-break problem that catches almost everybody the first time, and how to get around it.
First: this is not a customer review
The distinction matters more than anything else on this page, because getting it wrong can cost you your account.
- Customer reviews are the star-rated ones readers leave underneath your book. Amazon prohibits paying for these, in any form, and enforces it.
- Editorial reviews are trade-style critiques from reviewers and editorial studios — Kirkus, BookLife, Publishers Weekly and independents. They live in their own section of your book page, and paid editorial reviews are permitted there.
Everything below concerns the second kind. If a service offers to put star-rated reviews on your product page for money, walk away from it.
The six steps
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Sign in to Author Central
Go to
authorcentral.amazon.comand sign in with the account that publishes the book. This is not the same place as KDP, though the login often is — editorial reviews are managed in Author Central, not in your KDP bookshelf. -
Open Books, and pick the title
Your catalogue appears as a list. Select the book you want the review attached to. If a title is missing, it usually means it has not yet been claimed to your author profile — do that first and give it a few hours.
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Find the Editorial Reviews section
Within the book’s page there is an Editorial Reviews area, with several labelled fields: Review, From the Author, From the Inside Flap, About the Author and similar. You want the one marked Review.
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Paste the review text
Paste in the review you were sent. Keep the attribution with it — the reviewer or studio name belongs at the end, so a reader can see who said it. An unattributed review reads as the author praising themselves.
This is where the paragraph-break problem shows up. See the section below before you save.
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Save, and check what it did
Save the field, then look at the preview. Do not assume it went in the way you pasted it. Formatting is the thing that breaks here, and it is far easier to fix now than after it is live.
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Wait for it to appear on the live page
Amazon reviews the change before publishing it. In practice this usually takes up to about 72 hours, sometimes less, occasionally longer. There is nothing to chase during that window — if a week passes with no change, then it is worth contacting Author Central support.
The paragraph-break problem
Paste a multi-paragraph review into the Review field, save it, and the paragraph breaks vanish. What you get on the live page is one solid block of text running on with no separation — which makes a 400-word review genuinely hard to read, and looks careless in a place where it should look professional.
It is not something you have done wrong. The field simply does not preserve the breaks the way you would expect.
[Iwan — replace this paragraph with the exact fix demonstrated in the video, in your own words.] Whatever you show on screen should be written out here too, because a good many readers will land on this page and never press play.
Two things worth doing regardless of the method you use:
- Check the live page, not the edit box. The editor and the published page do not always agree. Look at the book as a reader sees it.
- Keep a clean master copy. If the formatting has to be redone later, you want the original text to hand rather than copying it back out of Amazon.
One more thing: marketplaces are separate
Author Central is not global. Adding a review at authorcentral.amazon.com covers Amazon.com only. For the UK, Australia, Canada, Germany and the rest, sign in to that marketplace’s own Author Central and repeat the same six steps.
It is tedious, and it is worth doing at least for the markets where you actually sell. A UK reader looking at amazon.co.uk will not see anything you added on the US store.
Where else the review can go
Once you own an editorial review, the Amazon field is only the first place it belongs.
- Kobo, Apple Books and Google Play, which all have description fields that accept it
- The back cover of your print edition, as a short pull-quote
- Your website and newsletter
- Press kits and blog-tour packs
- Paid advertising, where a third-party line outperforms your own copy
Need the review itself?
That part I can help with.
BlurbCraft Studio writes editorial reviews for independent authors — a full read, a 400-word review and three pull-quotes, formatted for exactly the field described above. From R1 350, about US$75.