Why I Like to Review Books

 After my divorce, when I moved to Victoria Texas, I happened to meet the op-ed editor at the local newspaper. He was speaking at an organization meeting and a friend introduced me to him. As a nice friend will do, she told him something about me, namely that I had had (at that time) four novels published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a publishing house with a great reputation throughout the publishing world. He asked me if I ever did book reviews, and I answered not really, just some reader remarks on Amazon pages. He then asked, "Would you like to? It doesn't pay much but we need another reviewer." And so I said yes. He then invited me to come to his office at the newspaper, have my picture taken, and look over the books that were stacked on a shelf there waiting to be reviewed. He told me that once I had reviewed a book, I could keep the book, sell the book, or give it to the library. Gee whiz! What a great proposition for a nutty book person like me.

I don't remember the first book I reviewed, but I had decided that I wouldn't give scathing reviews to any book. If I hated it enough to give a decimating review I would simply take the book back to the editor's bookshelf and let the other reviewer have a go. My thinking on this is that my job was to give readers (a diminishing group of people, right?) a reason TO read a book not an excuse not to read one. That's not to say that I gave all glowing reviews. I didn't. But to trash a book, I decided, wouldn't do anybody any good. I reviewed for this newspaper until a new editor took the helm, one who did away with the book page in the Sunday edition, or began using boilerplate reviews lifed from other sources. So, in all, I reviewed for a little over two years. I was sad to see it end. I liked going into the newspaper office to pick up my books. It made me feel a little bit like Clark Kent, all those busy reporters at their computer screen. And no, I did not get wealthy. In fact, my writing has never made me wealthy. I had a bit of a run with my first novel, but it wasn't like having an oil well in my backyard or anything. 

Since then, I have reviewed books on a more serious scale for Amazon, although I have never made it to their recognized Top Reviewer status. And now, I am reviewing books for Reedsy Discover, an online review page. I have only done one review so far, and am on my second one. The way they do it is they send you a list of books that have been submitted for reviews, and you get to select the ones that seem interesting to you. They let you have three at a time. These are supposed to be pre-reviews meaning prior to the publish date of the books in question. They like to be one of the first post-production review sites after a book launches. This means when you pick up a book from their list of available books, you get a deadline along with it. I don't like deadlines much, so I chose books that have a longer than normal deadline, although I find myself feeling sorry for those that are approaching deadline and haven't had a reviewer chose them yet. So this week I picked up one of those and am madly reading to try to complete the book and the review by June 2, which is just around the corner. Why do I do these things to myself???

But as a writer I know that book reviews can really help a book fly. I'm not sure that the old traditional way of submitting to all the newspapers in the country works anymore. So many papers have deleted their book review sections. If you're lucky enough to get one in the New York Times, well great, because they have a vital and energetic book section, as do some of the other big players. But everybody is vying for those reviews and they're not so easy to get. It's probably difficult to decipher how book reviews translate to book sales. I know I have seen books touted as Best Sellers that later end up on remainder tables at Dollar General, so there seems to be a lot of falsehood in the book selling business period. And it is the one industry where returns are acceptable at any time for any reason in any amount. If a book store orders 30 books because they're having an author event, and they only sell ten copies, they can return the other 20 and reverse the shipping charges. It was an old mis-belief that if the author signed all the other copies for the store to sell as "signed copies" those books would not be returned, but that turns out to be just another wife's tale. I have seen returns go back to the publisher with the author's signature on the inside page anyway. 

It's a dicey business, and all the cards are stacked in the favor of everybody else besides the writer, which seems strange to people who don't know this, because without the writer actually writing the damned book there wouldn't be anything for anybody to sell in the first place. But alas, the trouble is publishers are overwhelmed with manuscripts coming at them from all direction. This is why few will take an unsolicited, or unagented, manuscript in the first place. And even still there are thousands that end up waiting to be read by some underling "reader" and hopefully passed on up the chain to an actual editor. The odds are against us all. And anybody who thinks they can write a novel because they learned to parse a sentence in language class in 5th grade—well, there's a little bit more to it than that. However if you're serious about it, keep writing. After you've written a couple of million words, you might get lucky. Off the subject of reviews, but felt it needed to be said—again. I'm sure I'm repeating myself by now.

Onward....