How to Get the First Reviews for Your Translated Book

A translated edition of your book starts with no reviews, however well the original sells. Amazon treats it as a separate book, so the first reviews have to come from readers of the new language, and where you find them depends on that language. If you translated into English, the usual advance review copy (ARC) services such as Booksprout and BookSirens will do the job. For any other language, most of those services turn your book down or have few readers for it, and the reviewers are on the reading platforms of each country, where one exists, or among readers you reach yourself.

Help us keep this guide accurate. Review platforms change their rules and prices often, and we checked everything below in October 2026. If something has changed, or if you know a service or a tip that brought you reviews in your language, send us a message and we'll update the guide. Thank you for helping to make this better for everyone!

Why a Translated Edition Starts With No Reviews

On Amazon, the ebook, paperback and hardcover of a book share one product page and one set of reviews. Language is one of the details that must match for that to happen. KDP's help states that Amazon "can't link editions published in different languages on the same detail page", so a French edition and an English edition "will always have separate detail pages" (KDP help).

Reviews from other countries do not fill the gap either. Amazon shows reviews from another store only "across marketplaces where the same book's ASIN and format is live" (KDP help), and a translation has its own ASIN. The reviews of your English edition can follow that edition to Amazon.de, but they never appear on its German translation.

What does link your editions is your author page, where every book you publish appears together. Readers who look you up will find the original there, but the product page of the translation, which is what a shopper sees first, still shows no stars.

ARC Services When You Translate Into English

An ARC service lists your book in front of readers who sign up to get free copies and review them. A small American publisher that publishes into European markets told us these services are how many small publishers "get the ball rolling" on their reviews, and named Booksprout and BookSirens. There are others, and they price their service in very different ways:

Hidden Gems Books and Voracious Readers Only work in a similar way, with their own readers and their own pricing.

None of these services can promise reviews. They put your book in front of readers who like to review, and the cover, the blurb and the genre decide how many of them pick it.

What Booksprout and BookSirens Offer in Other Languages

BookSirens accepts only books in English. Its acceptance criteria say "Written in English", and its list of reasons for declining a book includes "It's not in English" (BookSirens support).

Booksprout accepts books in other languages, but few of its readers read them. An author who ran two campaigns for Spanish-language novels on Booksprout wrote on Trustpilot in August 2026: "I did not receive a single review from either of them." One of the two campaigns appeared to get no views at all. Booksprout's reply confirmed the reason: "Our foreign language feature, including Spanish, is still fairly new, so the reader pool for non-English campaigns is smaller than English ones right now." Booksprout offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, which makes a test campaign cheap, but don't build a launch around it for a book that isn't in English.

StoryOrigin is the most open of the services we checked. Its author interface is in English, but a Spanish guide for self-published authors notes that it lets you upload and promote books in Spanish without restriction (Ciberautores). How many of its readers read Spanish is another matter.

This matters for most authors who translate. On translateabook.com, about three orders in four over the 12 months to October 2026 were for a language other than English.

Where Readers Review Books in German, French, Spanish and Polish

Each country has its own reading sites, and some of them run the same kind of program as an ARC service. What we found, checked on each platform's own pages in October 2026:

German. LovelyBooks is the German social reading site whose Leserunden (reading rounds) are the German equivalent of an ARC campaign: you give away review copies to readers who read the book together and talk about it before they review it. Joining its author program is free. Publishers pay credits to run a Leserunde with review copies, but LovelyBooks announced in January 2024 that authors of independently published books are exempt and can still run them for free, while authors who publish through a self-publishing service such as epubli need a credit. Its current FAQ does not repeat the exemption, so confirm it with LovelyBooks before you plan around it. NetGalley Germany accepts authors, with prices sent on request, and Rezenzo lets authors offer digital review copies to its registered readers.

French. SimPlement connects publishers and independent authors with readers who review books ("chroniqueurs"), for print or digital review copies, and you choose who gets a copy. An account is free; authors are identified through the legal deposit of their book at the French national library (BnF). The site counts over 84,000 reviews received. NetGalley France works like the German site, with prices on request. Babelio's Masse Critique, a French giveaway of books for reviews, was closed to self-published authors when Babelio last answered the question in 2022.

Spanish. We found no Spanish-language NetGalley and no ARC platform built for Spanish-language indie books. StoryOrigin and Booksprout accept Spanish books, with the limits above. The rest comes from readers you reach directly, which the next section covers.

Polish. The review campaigns on the Polish reading site Lubimyczytać are run with publishers: its media patronage form asks for the publisher's name and an application at least two months before publication. We found no platform where a Polish indie author can offer review copies, so plan to find readers yourself.

Readers You Already Have

The quickest first reviews often come from people who already know your work. Some of the readers of your original may read the new language too, especially if your books already sell a few copies in that country's Amazon store. Ask your newsletter subscribers who reads German or French, and send them the translation before launch.

Where no platform exists, look for the readers' groups of that language on Goodreads and Facebook, and for the book bloggers who review your genre. Write to them in their own language, with the cover and blurb already localized, so they can see at once that the book is meant for them.

Your proofreader is the one reader who should not review the book: Amazon's rules on personal connections (below) rule that out. A proofreader who lives in the country can still point you to the local book bloggers and groups worth contacting.

Send Review Copies Before the Proofread Is Done

Reviewers need the book a few weeks before launch, and the usual order of work pushes that date back: the translation, then a native speaker's proofread, then the review copies. One publisher we work with changed the order. Once they trusted the quality of their AI translations, they started sending the translation to reviewers as a temporary review copy while their editor was still proofreading, and swapped in the edited version afterwards. Their books reach reviewers weeks earlier, and the single editor is no longer what holds up a launch.

This only works when the translation is good enough to be read as it is. With translateabook.com, Author mode reads the whole book before translating it and writes a translation guide (tone, characters, terminology) that you can correct first, and the translation of a novel comes back within hours, in your own file format. You can send that file to reviewers the same day and replace it once your proofreader is done. Our guide to finding a proofreader for a translated book lists where to look in each language.

Stay Within Amazon's Review Rules

Giving away free copies for reviews is an old practice in publishing, and Amazon allows it for books. Its Community Guidelines let customers "review free books (advanced reader copies) from authors or publishers", and add that authors "can't require a review in exchange for free books or try to influence your opinion".

In practice, offer the copy and invite an honest review, but never make the review a condition or ask for a good one. The same guidelines forbid reviews from anyone with "a personal connection" to the author, which rules out your friends, your family and the proofreader you paid, however well they know the book. Reviews that break these rules can be removed.

Plan the Reviews Before the Translation

With the speedup of a good AI translation, the search for reviewers can take longer than the translation itself, so start it first. Pick the platform for your language, check what it costs and how far ahead it needs the book, and set the launch date from there. If you are still deciding whether to translate at all, our article on whether to translate your self-published book covers which book and which language to start with.

To see how your book reads in the new language before you plan any of this, upload it to translateabook.com and read the free preview.