Readers want to review your books on Amazon, but they just haven't yet

How to create Sponsored Ads Review Request campaigns for verified purchasers to build social proof and retail readiness across your entire backlist.

Now you can pay to put an invitation in front of people who already bought your titles. Sponsored Ads Review Requests are now live for KDP accounts, and you set them up by creating a Sponsored Products campaign in Amazon Ads.

Amazon announced the feature on September 29, 2026, and we've been eagerly waiting for it to arrive. Before you jump in, read this entire post for optimization tips & more.

For now, this campaign type is easy to miss if you aren't looking carefully. It's hidden next to Amazon Business, underneath the normal Sponsored Products campaign creation window.

One takeaway from launching several of these campaigns is that setup isn't very different from normal, aside from the lack of negatives. Targeting is automatic, so you don't need to add any keywords or competitors.

While we wait for more data on average CPC, I suggest setting your default bid somewhere between $0.02 and $0.25 per invitation, depending on your need for reviews.

For most authors with a large backlist, one or two titles act as gateways for new readers and tend to collect the most reviews. In practice, this leaves many books that aren't retail ready for advertising, or that have fewer than 15 reviews, and their conversion rates suffer. On paper, these campaigns are designed to solve exactly that problem.

To maintain your backlist, I highly recommend setting these campaigns up with one book per ad group. For now, you can't create multiple ad groups per campaign. That said, creating one campaign for all your qualifying books won't greatly hurt overall efficiency while you test results for yourself.

I've seen advertisers split these campaigns by format. I can report that this cleans up the data for reporting, but I can't confirm that it accelerates total reviews. As a new rule, I'll be recommending these campaigns at the start of every new account I work with. They'll have a compounding effect on listings that take far too long to reach retail readiness, and we currently have an early-bird advantage on cost per click.

As for housekeeping, you can use a simple taxonomy like SP_Print_Reviews for these campaigns. The ad group name matters less, because there will only be one for now.

Closing the gap

Set a baseline using your best seller's reviews per week. According to early reports from Amazon, you can expect 3x as many reviews from advertising your books with this new ad type. That's a huge claim, though, and it may focus on the wrong metric entirely. The real deciding factor will be cost per incremental review. The closed beta ran during June.

Reviews amplify your brand. For authors with strong gateway books and underperforming titles in their series, this new tool is a must. Make sure your listings are fixed up first, though, because the detail page still matters. With this format, your A+ content will still be the last thing a reader sees before leaving a review. What I'm testing is whether this can help revive books that have essentially been blacklisted by bad reviews, and whether it's worth bringing readers back for a stronger rating.

For now, the limit is 1,000 reviews per book, so if your title has already earned more than that, it's ineligible. I would suggest, though, that the cost for any book with more than 15 reviews could be much higher, and that it's not currently worth chasing a slightly higher total.

Sources:

• Amazon Ads: "Accelerate authentic reviews with Review Requests" (Sep 29, 2026)
• Amazon Ads: "Branded conversion and Review Requests" (Sep 29, 2026)