Publishing 101 - Review Requests

Hey, Sweet Readers! I'm blogging today's Publishing 101 installment over at Pen and Muse!  (the first bit is here, but the rest is there, so you might as well just click through now. ;))


I thought I'd do a series of posts detailing my experiences taking Publishing 101 via publication of my debut novel.

My goal is to publish a book that is indistinguishable to my readers from any novel from a Big Five publisher.  It can be done - in fact, finding such a novel is the one thing that finally got me off my butt and pushed me to self-publish ONE.

Just as a traditionally published book has a huge team of professionals behind it, ONE does as well. My plan is to blog about every step of the process from agent-approved manuscript to published book. 

As a self-publisher, you’ve decided that the only audience whose approval of your book matters is the readers. Not agents, not editors – readers.

If the reader is the most important judge of your book, then it follows that the book reviewers/bloggers with large audiences of readers are your new gods and godesses.

Worship them.

No, I’m not kidding. Not one little bit.

Out of sheer benevolence (and possibly maybe one day ARCs of Big Deal Books) these people started using their precious personal time, without pay, to write thoughtful and helpful reviews of books. Those reviews were so good that other people started to read them, rely upon them, anticipate them, and follow their blogs. The more followers a reviewer has, the more authors want them to review their books.

That means that the book reviewers/bloggers you most want to be reading your book often have their pick of books – both traditionally and self-published – to read and review. That means that you will have to offer them more than “Hey! Free book! Now read it and say nice things about it!” to get them to agree to spend their time reading and reviewing your book (hopefully kindly.) This is ten times as true for self-published authors, who haven’t gone through the established and trusted quality control process of our colleagues in the Big Five houses.

To get in with these great reviewers,  you'll need to behave yourself. Click over to the full post on Pen and Muse for some very important "do"s and "don't"s  of getting awesome reviews for your book.