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.

The post Reviewing Reviews, or The Strange Little Business of Feeding the Marketing of Novels first appeared on David Guenette.

Here’s a quote from the review that captures, I think, what I’m trying to do with the series The Steep climes Quartet:

I felt less like I was being shown a future world and more like I was being asked to notice the one already forming around us. That’s unsettling. It’s also the book’s strength.

I’ve been writing a lot about climate fiction and what makes a story or novel climate fiction, and the reviews coming in are helpful articulations of this question. Of course, my pending interview with them will force me to articulate my view on this question of what makes fiction climate fiction.

You can buy the latest title in The Steep Climes Quartet from many places, including through your local bookstore using Bookshop.org or by simply asking your favorite bookseller to order Over Brooklyn Hills. Or Amazon, too, Kindle or paperback. Or ePub format.

This review copied below is from Literary Titans, which describes itself as “an organization of professional editors, writers, and professors passionate about the written word. We review fiction and non-fiction books in different genres, conduct author interviews, and recognize talented authors with our monthly Literary Titan Book Award. We are privileged to work with so many creative authors around the world and help them promote their work.” 

With the advent of independent publishing, there’s been a slew of such services, but Literary Titan has managed to be early in and is well regarded. Plus, their review is quite good of my recently published Over Brooklyn Hills, the third book of The Steep climes Quartet, so that speaks well of them, I’d say. Well, of course I would say this, but you can read what they say about my newest book in the four-book series:

Over Brooklyn Hills by David Guenette is a literary climate fiction thriller set in 2035, where climate change is no longer a warning on the horizon but a daily pressure shaping politics, money, migration, housing, violence, and ordinary private life. The story follows Davin Caine, now seventy, as he moves through a Berkshire County strained by rising costs, climate migration, and civic unease, while larger threats involving fossil fuel interests, international tensions, and the climate terrorist group No One is Safe push the novel into darker territory.

Guenette isn’t just interested in disaster as spectacle. He’s interested in the way disaster becomes routine. A hot spell, a housing meeting, a town budget, a person trying to keep a home, a young worker needing air conditioning, a local government trying to respond without losing its soul. These details give the novel its weight. I felt less like I was being shown a future world and more like I was being asked to notice the one already forming around us. That’s unsettling. It’s also the book’s strength.

The writing has a restless, observant quality that I found both engaging and, at times, intentionally uncomfortable. Guenette moves between characters with a wide lens, and his choices make the book feel crowded in the way real life is crowded. Davin’s reflective passages slow the story down in useful ways, giving the thriller elements more moral texture. Then the violence and conspiracy threads cut back in, sharp and ugly, reminding me that this is still a thriller with real stakes. I appreciated that balance. The book doesn’t let anyone stay clean for long, not activists, not politicians, not industries, not regular people trying to get through the week.

I would recommend Over Brooklyn Hills to readers who like climate fiction with a political pulse, especially those who want a thriller that thinks as much as it moves. It will appeal to readers who enjoy near-future stories grounded in realistic social consequences rather than end-of-the-world spectacle. If you like fiction that blends suspense, civic anxiety, personal reflection, and big-picture questions about responsibility, this book has plenty to offer.

Rating: 5

The post Another Editorial Review of Over Brooklyn Hills first appeared on David Guenette.

I am a student of climate fiction, and not surprisingly so, since I write climate fiction. I’ve long rejected the easy story of apocalypse, and not because such stories are uninteresting or a failure as a fun read, but because such stories most often have little to do with the subject of climate other than as a premise for the crisis. Likewise, I’m not a big fan of far-future stories that show mankind changed in response to the climate crisis, while the stories don’t bother to do the work of showing how the change comes about.

Let’s Set the Stage

Climate change is an astonishing event in our human culture. We have altered the climate of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and have already locked in more changes to the climate over the next many centuries. The reasons for our alteration of fundamental Earth systems make sense in that the fossil fuel-based energy provided to societies and their economies has pushed human development forward even as, supported by the energy abundance, the population numbers have exploded. The combination of huge energy use and ever-larger population numbers over the last two hundred years is the mechanism behind climate change.

It is an impressive achievement, really.

The problem is that the resulting change in the Earth’s climate is itself impressive, but darkly so, since we’re altering the stable climate of the last 10,000 years that supported the dominance of humans. The benefits of such a stable climate are now disappearing, increasingly being replaced by significant disadvantages. We’ve exhausted our species’ advantage from burning fossil fuels to power growth and population. In fact, we find ourselves facing a future that presents growing disadvantages for us in the form of horrendous heat waves, devastating deluges, deadly droughts, surging seas, damning diseases, and massive meteorological disasters.

Another important point to keep in mind is that we’ve known of these consequences for many decades. There’s a report titled The Greenhouse Effect, produced by J.F. Black, Scientific Advisor, Products Research Division, Exxon Research and Engineering Company, dated June 6, 1978. This report closely matches—scarily so—the rises in average global temperatures we’re now seeing and expect to see going forward. This is hardly the first such understanding of the greenhouse gas/global warming effect concluded by the fossil fuel corporations themselves in studies starting back nearly three-quarters of a century ago.

In fact, there are a shocking number of earlier studies on greenhouse gases and warming that began in the 1820s with Joseph Fourier identifying the atmosphere’s heat-trapping “greenhouse effect.” This was followed by Eunice Foote’s (1850s) experiments showing CO2’s powerful heat absorption, and John Tyndall’s (1859) confirmation of gases like CO2 and water vapor absorbing infrared heat. In 1896, Svante Arrhenius first calculated that human CO2 emissions could significantly raise Earth’s temperature, linking industrial activity to climate change, a concept later refined by Charles Keeling’s (1950s-60s) precise CO2 measurements.

Look up “Early 20th century newspaper stories about burning coal and the greenhouse effect.” Here’s the AI Search Summary you’ll find (I’ve left the links live):

Early 20th-century newspapers, notably in 1912, published short, syndicated articles linking coal combustion to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and future global warming. These reports, such as a famous August 1912 piece, accurately predicted that burning coal would act as a “blanket” to raise Earth’s temperature within a few centuries. [1, 2, 3]

Key Historical Clippings

• • 1912 Climate Change Article: Originally published in March 1912 in Popular Mechanics, and later in Australian/New Zealand newspapers (e.g., The Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal and Rodney and Otamatea Times) in August 1912, this report was titled “Coal Consumption Affecting Climate” or similar.
  • What it Stated: The 67-word article noted that furnaces were burning 2 billion tons of coal annually, adding roughly 7 million tons of CO2 to the atmosphere yearly. It explained that this CO2 acts as a “blanket” that raises temperature, predicting, “This effect may be considerable in a few centuries”.
  • Scientific Context: This was not the first instance of such reporting. It followed pioneering work by scientists like Svante Arrhenius, who predicted this effect in 1896, and earlier studies by H.A. Phillips in 1882. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

Keep in mind that a number of the big fossil fuel corporations had commissioned their own studies in the 1970s and 1980s, although we don’t know the exact count, and probably won’t until the discovery phases of liability cases against the fossil fuel corporations take place and are made public. Unless, of course, SCOTUS rules that fossil fuel companies are protected against liability lawsuits, and remember, SCOTUS has done this for the gun companies.

Climate Change is a Fantastic Story in the Real World

A recent Substack post in Climate Fiction Writers League, “Imagination, Mythology, and the Return to Earth, by Steve Stine, author of I, Enoch, May 05, 2026, is unfortunately typical of what is found in this Substack. The intro to the post is as follows:

Steve Stine talks about mythology in fiction. His sci-fi novel I, Enoch, is about a race to save the world from the prospect of a sixth mass extinction. Enoch embarks on a dangerous mission with the help of ancient patrons and in the company of those with special knowledge of Earth’s hidden secrets. 

The first thing that set me off is Stine’s use of the manned moon mission as an example of the age of science, setting Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon in opposition to mythic storytelling. “And yet, what we gained that day in the annals of space exploration, we lost in the age-old story-telling traditions that bestowed upon the moon a mythic quality. For countless generations and throughout the world, the moon played a lead role in shaping cultures, aligning belief systems, and influencing human behavior.”

Good to know, I guess. It turns out that the moon is made of straw, not cheese, and that it’s the old straw man in the moon. Stine waxes nostalgic on the role the moon once played in human imagination, and bemoans that now, somehow, we’ve lost what for the ancients was the understanding that “…not knowing [is] fertile ground for story-telling.” There’s mention of the Age of Reason, and Voltaire, David Hume, and Thomas Paine come up, along with their complaints about myths. Stine comments, “…[T]he substance and purpose of mythology suffered a full-frontal assault by those bent on placing science at the centre of our cultural transformation.” The straw man argument here is that “not knowing” and science are oppositional, and if not knowing” is essential for story-telling, then somehow, amid all the test tubes and data sets, we’ve lost the ability to tell a story. “Today, the word ‘myth’ is synonymous with a falsehood,” Stine then claims. Well, it can be, but myth has other meanings and hewing only to the falsehood definition is itself false. Let’s turn to a product of science (and imagination!) to test definitions. Here is the Google AI summary of the definition of myth:

A myth is a traditional, often sacred narrative explaining a culture’s worldview, beliefs, or natural phenomena, typically featuring gods or heroes in a remote era. While commonly misconstrued as a “false story,” a myth acts as a symbolic, foundational truth for a community, rather than a literal historical account. [1, 2, 3]

Key Definitions of Myth:

• • Sacred Narrative: A story of ostensibly historical events that explains a culture’s practices, beliefs, or natural phenomena (e.g., creation myths).
  • Cultural Worldview: A story that defines a group’s identity, often involving divine or supernatural beings, which is revered as true and authoritative within that culture.
  • Common Usage (False Belief): A popular but unsubstantiated belief or false notion (e.g., “the myth of racial superiority”). [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Key Characteristics:

• • Anonymous Origin: Usually told without a known author, passed down through generations.
  • Symbolic Truth: Myths are often metaphorically or symbolically true, even if factually false.
  • Functions: They serve to answer fundamental questions (creation, death) and justify social systems and rites. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Myth vs. Related Terms:

• • Myth vs. Legend: Legends are usually based on historical figures or events, though often exaggerated, whereas myths operate in a, “primordial,” or non-specific time involving gods.
  • Myth vs. Folktale: Folktales are told for entertainment or moral instruction rather than being considered sacred or strictly true. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Myths, Storytelling, and the Modern Age of Climate Fiction

I understand Stine’s interest in supporting the concept of myth—his book, I, Enoch, presents the following description on Amazon:

I, Enoch is an enthralling journey into a world where ancient secrets and modern ambitions collide. Enoch, the protagonist, stands as a guardian of lost truths and protector of the marginalized, battling against forces that hold dominion over the planet. In a race to save the world from the prospect of a sixth mass extinction, Enoch embarks on a dangerous mission with the help of ancient patrons and in the company of those with special knowledge of Earth’s hidden secrets. As he delves deeper, Enoch confronts not only external adversaries but also internal dilemmas about justice, knowledge, and power. This tale weaves together mysticism with gritty realism, creating a tapestry rich with philosophical questions and the perennial quest for understanding one’s purpose. As Enoch wrestles with his responsibilities and the consequences of his actions, the reader is invited into a vividly crafted universe that challenges the conventional boundaries between history and myth, between what is known and what is imaginable. This book promises to leave readers pondering their own place in the history of humankind and the universe.

To be fair, I’ve not read the entire book, just samples from the book as well as descriptive copy, so maybe I’m using I, Enoch as my own straw man.

Storytelling exists across many modalities, where myth, in the word’s various connotations, is but one. I happen to like Carl Jung’s sense of archetypes within the human mind and Joseph Campbell does a great job tying the history of myths into literature. Heck, I took a course as an undergraduate called “Myth in Literature,” where I got to read Eric Neumann’s The History of Consciousness, for pete’s sake, so I’m no anti-myth guy, honest. I also don’t see myth and science as opposites, not when it comes to human imagination and storytelling. What sticks in my craw is the propensity of novels calling themselves climate fiction that focus on fantasy, and that includes altered species or fairies or demi-gods, or far-future distant or dystopian worlds, or radical changes in human nature often focused on gender issues or BIPOC, all the while too often fitting into hyper-genre writing markets instead of having climate change the central focus. There are many fantasy, romance, thriller, or science fiction novels that have some “climate” orientation or other, but that clearly don’t address the clear issues of climate change, either in cause or solution. We’re burning fossil fuels and heating the planet. Isn’t this time and place of crucial threat to the world an interesting enough story? Who needs allegory when the menace and what needs doing to address it is staring us right in the face?

To be clear, there are many excellent climate fiction works. Think Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future; Nicky Singer’s The Survival Game; Richard Powers’s The Overstory; Jenny Offill’s Weather; Omar El Akkad’s American War; Arthur Jeon’s Snowflake; Nick Fuller Goggin’s The Great Transition; Paul E. Hardisty’s The Forcing; Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife; Stephen Markely’s The Deluge; Chuck Colin’s Altar to an Erupting Sun; and J. Underwood’s The Bell Lap, to name some. But out of the 160-plus “climate fiction” novels I’d noted in building a Goodreads list (an effort I abandoned in late 2024 due to the sheer volume and size of the task), the sort of climate fiction I prefer remains a small minority.

And sure, it is a matter of taste, in part. But what sets climate fiction apart from other categories? Might it not be the topic and focus on where we are now and how we address climate change? Any category that is too inclusive ends up losing value as a category. Novels that turn to deus ex machina may be fun, but there’s not much of a real climate change solution being investigated in such stories. Fantasy can be a fun read and teach the reader about the human condition, but unless it is actively focused on climate change, does it fit into the category of climate fiction? Myths and allegories and social criticism can be edifying, and romances and thrillers and crime novels can be entertaining, but maybe climate fiction should directly address climate change and what we might imagine doing about the problem.

There’s this idea of “thrutopia” in climate fiction which I define as climate fiction that shows where we are in the world of changing climate and how we get to where we’re going. I like to quote the old Down Easter joke, “You can’t get there from here,” but getting from where we are today to the world we are heading to—solutions successful or not—seems likely the real focus for climate fiction.

The post Climate Fiction and Myth in Climate Fiction first appeared on David Guenette.