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8 Ways To Find Good Reviewers For Your New Book
By Rev Michael Bresciani, Thu Dec 8th
Getting reviews online is far easier than you may think. Butbeware; there are a few serious pitfalls that you should beaware of. Review Your Reviewer: You will be sorry if you do not take thetime to get a pretty good picture of your reviewer. Use e-mail,snail mail or anything else you’ve got to pop a few questions toyour reviewer. If the review is on radio or TV place a few phonecalls in advance. Why? You must get a fix on your reviewer’sposition and general inclination. If your writing is inreligion, check the doctrinal position of the reviewer. APentecostal book is bound to come up short in a conservativecatholic review. If your book is written with a conservativepolitical bent, it will not do well under the scrutiny of aliberal
democrat. You must check out every aspect of thereviewer’s mindset that you can by any means you can. If youdisregard this advice you will suffer for it. Review the Reviewers Reviews: Read carefully everything you canfind that your reviewer has previously written. They can beaggressive without being hyper critical or belligerent. Somereviewers have a pompous attitude. Usually they are not writersthemselves. If you find some that are writers they will be fareasier to work with because they know all the problems andpitfalls in this profession. A reviewer has opportunity to rubelbows with some people that the rest of us will only know inname only. This does tend to give them an exploded sense oftheir own importance. How will you know if this is the case withyour reviewer? Simple, read their stuff. An attitude is an easything to spot. Don’t get the idea that your book is so good thatno one could possibly find anything bad to say about it. Crankypeople are usually very consistent, don’t take a chance. (Article continued below)
Avoid the Reviewer who is Too Personal: When reading a reviewerswork see if they are comparing what they are critiquing withother writing that contrasts the book under review. Also do theyfind similarities to the book under discussion and other booksperhaps in the same genre? If every reflection they make comesfrom their own position, emotion or mindset you should be verycareful about submitting your work to them. Remember you spentweeks, months or years putting together your book; they mayspend only a few hours at the most perusing your labors. Don’tlet someone who is having a bad hair day remove your firstchance to get a little press for the great American novel. Grammar and Spelling Snafus: It goes without saying that allgrammar and spelling issues should be covered before thepublication of your book. It also goes without saying that nomatter how hard you try, they are not. If you self publish oruse a (POD) print on demand publisher there is a greater chanceof these errors breaking through un-noticed. The galley proofsoffered by these publishers may be very hard to negotiate and itis usually the author doing every bit of the work. Most authorsgetting published for the first time are duly excited and suchmistakes are prone to make it across the bar. Remember that thebest authors in the world will have spelling and grammarproblems at times. Even in the major publishing houses where amile long group of proof readers have taken up to a year tofinish a book, mistakes are made. Here is the bottom line whenit comes to a reviewer noticing and dancing with your mistakesin a review. It stinks. First it is the sign of a veryunskillful reviewer, especially when it comes to first timeauthors with POD books. It is almost understood that first trieswill have a few more mistakes than the veterans do and for areviewer to make a big deal of those problems is hitting belowthe belt by any standards. Don’t even approach such reviewers ifyou see they make a practice of this. If they feel a need to saythat a book is a self published work they are miserably out oftouch. This is the day of the POD and thousands of books arecoming through this conduit that can stand beside any of the bigboys from the major houses. Don’t Forget Online Newspapers: Online newspapers usually followthe same editorial guidelines of the printed paper. They are farmore forgiving than online reviewers. These are the people whomake corrections daily of things misquoted, misspelled andmissed completely. They deal with writing and John Q Publiceveryday and that daunting task makes them more understanding offellow journalists. Follow all the same rules for approachingweb review sites and above all get to know all you can aboutyour critic before you bundle up a dozen review copies and slidethem off the runway to the papers. Look for the Honest but Skillful Reviewer: An honest reviewerwon’t hide the negatives and failings of your book but they willskillfully blend them into a larger picture without burning downthe city. Such people are artist experienced in balancing ofliterary achievement and fledgling endeavor. How do you findsuch people? Once again review the reviewer’s reviews! Let The Public Be Your Reviewer: Amazon has a program thatallows some of the pages of your book to be seen as a means ofdrawing the reader into your material. You will receiveresponses from this, that can be perused, archived and used onyour website, your publicity efforts, and your letters andanywhere you choose. Google also has a wonderful program called,Google Print. They put up the cover of your book, a bit of anauthor bio and not more than twenty percent of the content ofyour book to be seen by anyone worldwide. Links can pointdirectly back to your site or any other place where the book maybe purchased. You will receive various responses that can bearchived for press releases, short web reviews, blogs orwhatever. Beware Of Blogs: For a new author to submit the contents oftheir new release to a blog in whole or in part is like runningthe gauntlet. Blogs are all too much of a free for all. EveryTom, Dick and Harry has got an opinion. They are certainlyentitled to their opinion but be sure of one thing, an opiniondoes not a review make. The chance of getting a fair review on ablog is in general about zero. What you will have is a lot ofpeople passing around a lot of second hand information. You mayhave someone praising your stuff and in the next minute callingyou something that is several notches hotter than PG-13. Tillyou have a better rep as an author, do not expose you’re writingto the free for alls. About the author:Rev Bresciani is from New Orleans La and the author of…Hook lineand Sinker or What Has Your Church Been Teaching You,PublishAmerica 2005 and…An American Prophet and His Message,Questions and Answers on the Second Coming of Christ, XulonPress 2005. His website is, http://americanprophet.org | 