Some funny things happen on the way to the forum.
Over Brooklyn Hills has been garnering pretty good reviews, as I’ve written here, here, and here. I describe this book as “Literary Climate Fiction,” which may be of little utility in the ongoing development of fiction taxonomies, but it should suggest the book is not a hyper-genre formula of action and plot but rather a work of “storytelling that prioritizes character development, psychological depth, and thematic exploration over plot-driven action.” Feel free to look up your own definition of “literary fiction” on the web and see if I’m wrong.
One of the aims of The Steep Climes Quartet is to write away from the easy tropes of apocalypse and instead attempt to imagine people’s reactions to the odd and pressing conditions collectively known as climate change. But how do you get your book reviewed—or, even, found—if there’s not widely applied category for it?
The Editorial Review Biz
An author wants to have the world say something about a published book. Reviews can help a book but a lack of reviews will hurt a book. Self-publishers know it. Big trade publishers know it. Even the neophyte struggling with a first book on KDP knows it.
Basically, the trade book business is largely sold through social media these days, and that’s true even for the big boys. If a book shows up on Amazon and there are no Amazon reviews of it, the chances of getting the browser to buy the book when it looks like no one else has is slim to none. If you have editorial reviews such as Publishers’ Weekly, The New York Times, or Kirkus, that’s a big help. Even book blurbs help, that odd practice of saying far too little about a book by someone who carries reputational value or relevant association, encouraging people to believe the book being considered for purchase may, in fact, be a worthwhile bet. But a book will need the best editorial accolades to escape the black spot of no or few customer reviews. Frankly, a book without reviews—editorial and customer—looks downright naked, just sitting there shivering, waiting to get picked up for Christmas Holiday with all the luggage packed, but no one is coming, boo-hoo.
Remember crowd-sourcing? That’s what Amazon customer reviews are, and Goodread’s, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and BookBub, to name only some. In theory, such customer reviews help the would-be book buyer lessen the anxiety of being played the fool. Such reviews provide the affirmation of the crowd, but as many readers discover, customer reviews are written by all sorts of readers and one reader’s literary treasure is another reader’s genre trash. You might also keep in mind that “crowd-sourcing,” like the social media platforms that engender it, is falling into enshittification, and these days typically in the form of grade inflation where most books or products seem to have close high scores that can, with infuriating frequency, not match your actual experience with the book or product. These days, the crowds may be saying less than you think, and the sourcing more the result of algorithms and platform customer management, but let’s leave that for another day.
Still, it’s a weird number game. The necessary numbers of customer reviews vary across opinions, and the presence of other types of affirmations factor in too. You have the coveted The New York Times Best-Seller flag? Terrific. Pulitzer, Booker, Calidcott, or any of the other big literature awards? Hurray! Publishers Weekly tells the world that your book is brilliant? Wonderful. The problem is that the main stream validators of books like Publishers Weekly can only review so many books and the chances of your book getting a slot is slim to none, especially if you lack the backing of one of the major trade publishers. What’s rising to meet the needs of the vast majority of books left standing in the cold is the editorial review business.
The landscape of editorial reviews is confusing. Publishers Weekly can also review your book for a fee, but even here the magazine’s bandwidth remains small, so Booklife, a part of the Publisher Weekly enterprise, was created and is designed to provide editorial reviews for a fee—somewhere, typically, in the $400-$500 range—and the volume of reviews—the bandwith—is much larger than the original Publishers Weekly pipeline. Kirkus is another such service, on par, some say, with Publisher Weekly reviews, but with a bigger pipeline for fee-based reviews. Some similar traditional review services focus on other segments of book publishing, such as Foreword Reviews, for indie and university presses; Library Journal, which is sometimes described as essential for getting your book in front of library acquisition buyers; and Booklist, which is published by the American Library Association and, not surprisingly, aimed at library collection development librarians and educators.
There’s been something of a complementary explosion in the number of these services as self-publishing has exploded. There’s Independent Book Review, Self-Publishing Review, Book Sirens, IndieAuthors, Booksprout, NetGalley, BlueInk, Book Raid, BookBub, Books Go Social, and the list goes on. Many of these review services not only provide reviews but also marketing and promotion addenda including awards and badge displays, social media promotion packages, ARC (advanced reader copy) distribution management, and interview and podcast features. Many of these organizations have feeder mechanisms to editorial and book production services, too. And an author can always look up on Reedsy for any and all such services from independent contractors.
About Those Amazon Reviews
As mentioned earlier, many online potential book buyers look to online reviews whatever the sales channel. What I didn’t mention before—mostly because it’s an indisputable fact—is that Amazon is the largest online bookseller, and actually the largest bookseller online or off, which is why I’m talking about Amazon customer reviews.
One reason why customer reviews are important for online sales is that the informational feedback is thin online, unlike the experience in a physical bookstore where the potential book buyer has the book in hand. Ironically, online bookstores often have far more information about the book than a would-be buyer would see in the real-life experience standing among the shelves, but how many people even know about Amazon’s Author-Plus pages that a publisher or author can provide about any particular book, and Amazon also provides the infrastructure for what they call A+ Content, another specific book-related pile of all kinds of information about the book in question. Heck, it looks like a lot of publishers and authors remain ignorant about these additional information features, but then no one ever said Amazon makes marketing books easy.
On the other hand, the visceral experience of holding a physical book goes a long way for informing potential buyers about the book being held. Heft, graphics, book cover copy, frontmatter, and, of course, the ability to thumb through the pages and take a gander at the actual writing. Sure, you can virtually do much of this online too, although the available “Read Me” sample is constrained to publisher-selected spots through the book, and, often, simply the frontmatter and first chapter. Besides, in the physical world there’s that new book smell and that bookstore employee you can’t help thinking will conclude you’re a bum if you don’t buy something.
But on Amazon a book can look awfully lonesome without an army of customer reviews. There are some services that provide customer reviews for fee, and what proud papa of a brand new novel doesn’t want to advantage his or her new book? There’s a company called Book Award Pro that has recently added such a service, along with its bread-and-butter offerings of access to book award databases and the ability—for a fee—to submit your new darling novel to such award opportunities, and let me tell you, there are many, many such opportunities, for good or ill.
Their Amazon review program is tempting, especially if you don’t have a big publisher with a solid PR and promotion department behind you, or if you don’t come from a particularly large family or hold solid blackmail threats against the whole church choir.
And, hey, I didn’t want to see Over Brooklyn Hills looking naked, right?
So I tried the Book Award Pro Amazon customer review service out. I wasn’t optimistic, plus I hate spending money. The service is relatively inexpensive and part of the fee goes toward the reviewer buying the ebook version, a nice little sales pop, although one that makes no economic sense in and of itself. But, indeed, the Amazon customer reviews are “verified purchase” reviews, and thus kosher. In fact, this is one of the attractive elements of this specific service—it won’t run you foul of Amazon’s review policies that can end up getting you kicked off the platform if you get caught gaming the customer reviews, such as by creating a bot to crank them out. The all-knowing algorithm, well, knows all, so I wouldn’t be surprised that the Book Award Pro customer review service ends up triggering a negative reviews review, especially if the company doesn’t up its standards.
My review of the Book Award Pro Amazon customer review service is that it is awful. In order to check it out I spent $199 for three such reviews and all three reviews focused on the same one character in the identically long two-sentence reviews. Mind you, the character they all focus on is a great character, but only one storyline of many, and so the reviews don’t give a good sense of the book overall. And then there is the problem of the reviewers all pretty much saying the same thing, making me wonder if the short reviews may very well have been AI-generated by the very same AI, and I can’t get the image out of my mind of a printer in a dark room somewhere cranking them out in sequence. I don’t know if the three reviews are AI generated, and my suspicion that one person did all three reviews has no evidence, but let me repeat, Book Award Pro’s Amazon customer reviews service is awful.
I’m sticking with the old-fashioned organic customer reviews, thanks.
To Publish is to Suffer
As with so many other tempting shortcuts to fame and fortune, the truth is that selling copies of a novel these days is hard. The signal-to-noise problem is excruciatingly difficult to overcome, there being all the noise of some three-to-four million trade books published each year. There’s some talk these days that print fiction reading may be in an all-time slump, or maybe it is book reading overall that happens less and less. Sure, I’ll produce audiobook versions of The Steep Climes Quartet series, since everyone tells me that this is the thing to do, but the production will be touched by resentment from this pro-text guy. I’ll try my best to hide my true feelings about audiobooks.
What purportedly sells are romances, thrillers, and horror, and most of such books are what I call hyper-genre that share the common traits of low character-to-action ratio. Or is that a shallow character-to bodice-ripping ratio? It’s all a matter of taste, said the lady as she kissed the cow (I’m still in search of the source of the second half of this cliché, but maybe my father came up with this addendum.)
As it so happens, sales of Over Brooklyn Hills are picking up despite not being a hyper genre work, but I’ll be hundreds of book sales short of making expenses back for a while and as likely as not, ever. After all, putting out a novel takes money—sure, not on the scale of producing an album or movie—but editors and proofreaders need paying and editorial reviews are rarely for free, especially for someone occupying my level of Dante’s book authorship Inferno.
It turns out that Over Brooklyn Hills has already won an award:
We are proud to present you with the Literary Titan Book Award. Following the recent review of your book through our Book Review Service, it was automatically entered into our Literary Book Award competition. Your book deserves extraordinary praise, and we are proud to acknowledge your hard work, dedication, and writing talent. Start telling the world that you’re an award-winning author because we will be!
You will find the book award image attached to this email. Display it proudly on your book’s cover or anywhere else that you want to display it.
Well, thanks, and better than a sharp stick in the eye, that’s for sure, and if this helps more people read my work, that’s great. One of the hellish aspects of writing is the author’s desire to see the work out and about in the world and the typical frustration of that desire and don’t let anyone tell you different. Sure, the driving force of writing must be the pleasure derived through the act of writing, but a writer having readers is kind of crucial too.
At least that’s what those hundreds of editing and publishing and marketing service companies, including reviewer and awards services, tell me they can help me with, for a price.