✅ Reviews on Indieguana

Indieguana takes a different approach to book reviews. Rather than building a walled garden where reviews only exist inside the platform, we connect the review ecosystem that already exists — while also building toward a native system designed to be meaningful rather than gameable.

Verified Reviews — For Authors

If your book has already been reviewed on other platforms — Goodreads, BookTok, a reader’s blog, Amazon, wherever — you can import those reviews directly onto your book page on Indieguana.

To submit a review for your book:

1. Go to your book page and scroll to the Imported Reviews tab in the Reviews section.
2. Find Import a Review.
3. Paste in the review text, the reviewer’s name, and the original source URL where the review lives.
4. Submit it for approval.

Submitted reviews go to the Indieguana team for verification. We check that the review exists at the source URL you provided before approving it. Once approved, the review appears on your book page with a ✓ Verified badge, and a rotating chyron of your verified reviews scrolls above your book’s hero section — giving them prominent, beautiful placement without requiring you to write ad copy.

The source URL is never shown publicly. Visitors see the review and the reviewer’s name — the link is for verification purposes only.

Community Review Links — For Readers

This is one of the features we’re most proud of. Most book platforms treat reviews as text that lives inside their system and nowhere else. Indieguana does the opposite: if you’ve reviewed a book on YouTube, your blog, a podcast on Spotify, Bookstagram, BookTok, or anywhere else on the internet, you can submit that link directly to the book’s page on Indieguana.

When your review link is approved, it appears in the Community Reviews section of that book’s page — with your platform badge, a short excerpt, and a link that sends readers directly to your content. Every reader who discovers that book on Indieguana becomes a potential new viewer, listener, or subscriber for you.

To submit a community review link:

1. Go to the book page you reviewed.
2. Scroll to the Community Reviews tab in the Reviews section.
3. Click Submit Your Review Link.
4. Choose your platform (YouTube, Blog, Goodreads, BookTok, Podcast, Bookstagram, or Other).
5. Paste your review URL and add a short excerpt — a pull quote or summary of your take.
6. Submit for approval.

You’ll receive an email notification once your submission is approved or if it’s declined. Approved links appear publicly on the book page. You can also manage and remove your own submitted links from your Reader Profile.

Indieguana is built on the belief that book reviewers are part of the publishing ecosystem, not just traffic to be harvested. Community review links are our way of making sure the people who put effort into talking about books get something back for it!

Native Reviews — Coming Soon

We’re building a native review system designed from scratch to be more useful than a star rating — and much harder to game. Here’s how it will work.

Five-Axis Scoring

Instead of a single star rating, every native review scores the book across five axes — each rated 1 to 5, displayed as a score out of 10:

• Plot — structure, payoff, and narrative drive
• Characters — depth, consistency, and relatability
• Prose — sentence-level writing quality and voice
• Pacing — how well the story moves from scene to scene
• World — setting, atmosphere, and believability of the story’s environment

Aggregate scores across all five axes are shown on the book page once a minimum of three qualifying reviews have been submitted. This threshold prevents a single review from defining a book’s reputation before there’s enough signal to be meaningful.

Verification Requirements

To submit a native review, a reader must meet all of the following:

• Account age: Your Indieguana account must be at least 7 days old.
• Finished shelf: The book must be on your Finished reading shelf.
• No self-reviews: Authors cannot review their own books.
• ARC badge: ARC recipients are flagged on their review so readers can weigh early access context appropriately.

Rollout

The native review system is fully designed and will roll out once Indieguana’s traffic and active readership can sustain a meaningful review volume. A review system with 40 books and 200 users produces thin, unreliable data. We’re building the community first so the reviews mean something when they arrive.

A radar chart visualization — plotting all five axes simultaneously for a book’s aggregate score — is planned as a future enhancement once the native system is live.