Crime Fiction Dossier

Ask the Critic: Why don't you review self-published novels?

An anonymous self-published author asks:

Why don't you review self-published novels along with the traditionally published books?

The short answer is: time and quality.

The long answer is that I don't have enough time to read but a fraction of the trade-published crime novels released in the U.S. each year. That number is somewhere around 2000 books per annum. Out of all those I read maybe 120 or so -- figure 10 a month*. The other 94% of crime novels, I don't have a chance to read.

That's a stunning number of books that it's simply impossible for me to get to. Now imagine if I were to add all the self-published novels to that figure. I can't imagine how many of them there are, but surely that number is in the high hundreds if not thousands. When would I have the time to read any of them? So I have to draw a line somewhere. (More later on why I draw the line here.)

The second aspect of time has to do with reviews. I review five books each month in my Chicago Sun-Times column. It takes a lot of books to get down to that five; at a minimum the 10 books per month mentioned earlier. Since newspapers generally won't run reviews of self-published novels, and since the majority of my reading is driven by my review obligations, I can't afford to give up any of the slots in my reading schedule to them.

The other factor, and this is why I draw the line where I do, is quality. In my experience the overall quality level of self-published fiction is not sufficiently high for the books to be given serious consideration. This is not to say that all self-published fiction is bad. The law of probability alone would indicate that at least some of it must be readable. But the vast majority of it is not.

There are many reasons for this (e.g., self-published fiction has no third-party vetting, most of it is not professionally edited, much of it was already rejected by agents/editors for a variety of reason), but the bottom line is that most self-published fiction just isn't very good.

I used to consider self-published fiction -- I even reviewed two books that I can recall. But those were the only two out of scores of books that I looked at. The rest weren't worthy of consideration. And nothing I've seen in the intervening years has compelled me to change my mind.

So that's it in a nutshell. I wish I had the time to read more books or were somehow able to read faster. But even if that were the case, I'd have to increase my productivity by an order of magnitude before I could even consider adding self-published novels to the mix.

*Note: Over the past three years I've averaged about 13 books read per month. That accounts for the new crime fiction mentioned above, along with older crime fiction and a limited amount of science fiction, non-fiction and other assorted stuff. But not much of it.

The confines of the crime genre

I read Janet Maslin's laudatory review of Dennis Lehane's new book, The Given Day, yesterday in the Times. It's an interesting, thoughtful review and made me consider reading the book, although I haven't been overly enamored with Lehane's work in the past.

One line leapt out of me from the review and stuck with me: "He has written a majestic, fiery epic that moves him far beyond the confines of the crime genre."

I've been thinking about that statement since I read it, wondering exactly what the confines of the crime genre are. And near as I can come up with, a crime novel has to have a crime (either past or future) play an important part in the plot, or else it somehow has to deal with crime or the aftermath of crime in a significant way. Other than that, I think anything is fair game.

As I indicated, I haven't read The Given Day. But judging by the description and the reviews I've read, the book involves the lives of police officers, a terrorist attack, spying, bomb-throwing anarchists, suspense, corruption, anti-union violence...Well, damn, that sounds a lot like a crime novel to me.

It's almost like Ms. Maslin (and I wouldn't be surprised if other critics wrote something similar) is embarrased to admit that she really liked and admired a book of significant literary achievement -- that just happened to be a crime novel.

We saw some of this reaction earlier this year with Richard Price's superb Lush Life, another novel of literary prowess that, oh yeah, was a crime novel.

This idea seems particularly strange coming from Maslin, as she so often reviews crime fiction, frequently quite favorably. (And has even been known to gush in a somewhat unseemly manner over the novels she's particularly taken with.) So why the resistance at acknowledging that a book can be great, literary and a crime novel, with no contradictions inherent therein?

Online vs. print reviewing

The subject of online vs. print reviewing has been much debated in recent months, fueled by the devastating erosion of print outlets for book coverage. A piece on the Literary Saloon summarizes some of the recent discussion.

The piece includes a quote that I found interesting: "In certain areas Internet coverage has long superseded newspaper coverage: review-coverage of genre books (mystery, science fiction, romance) is far superior in range and, for the most part, quality than what can be found in newspapers."

I began as an online reviewer before moving into print and I have continued to write in both mediums for over five years now. But I have yet to discover an online outlet that consistently covers the crime genre with the skill that print critics like Patrick Anderson, Oline Cogdill or Janet Maslin (to name just a few) bring to the table.

Granted, there is far, far more coverage of crime novels online than there is in print. But is it better in quality? That's where I am less convinced. There are several sites that do an admirable job of covering the genre as it relates to publishing, trends, gossip, comings-and-goings and assorted matters -- things that seldom get written about in print. But what about reviews?

I think there certainly can be great reviewing done online -- and, hopefully, eventually there will be. But I also think that as long as there isn't a monetary component to online reviewing, it's going to be difficult to have truly fine critics producing top-quality, professional work.

Book reviews still matter

Random House and Zogby did a poll of the reading and book-buying habits of over 8,000 adults. They generated some interesting results -- for example, only 11% of respondents said they are comfortable reading books in non-traditional formats, such as online or with an e-book reader or PDA -- so it's worth taking a look at.

Here's one stat that I found especially interesting: "When asked what makes them want to buy a book, 60% said suggestions from friends and family members, while nearly half (49%) said they are influenced by book reviews." (emphasis mine)

So reviews are definitely still having an impact. If only the people running newspapers and magazines would listen.

How to ask for a book review

I made a post a while back on how not to talk to book reviewers. Now here's one on how you should. (I've written about this before, but it never hurts to repeat.)

1. Know who the reviewer is. If you don't know who you're asking for a review, then why are you writing to them?

2. Address the person by name. At least have the good manners to find out who you're writing to. (And if you're going to do this by mail merge, at least make sure it's not blatantly obvious.)

3. State upfront why you're writing. For example: "I'm a mystery author with a new book coming out and I'm hoping for a review." (You can say it more elegantly than that.)

4. Give the pertinent details: Author's name, book title, publisher, format (hardback, paperback, etc.), publication date.

5. Include a short synopsis. No more than a couple sentences.

6. Briefly include any interesting hook that might appeal to that reviewer: you're a local author, it's a debut novel, you're an FBI agent, you just won the Edgar. (If you don't have a cool hook, nevermind. You don't have to have one.)

Things you shouldn't include:

1. Blurbs.

2. Press release.

3. Excerpts from other reviews.

4. Long summaries.

5. Attachments.

6. Claims that this is the best book I'll ever read (and other assorted puffery).

Remember: your goal is to make it as easy as possible for the reviewer to say yes. Reviewers always have many more books than they can possibly read, much less review, and they also tend to be cranky SOBs. Don't give them a reason to say no before they've even considered the book.

How not to talk to reviewers

I get emails almost every day from authors, telling me about their books, asking for reviews, etc. And that's fine. I make my email address public and easy to find so that people can always get in touch with me. I like hearing from writers, readers, etc. That's part of why I do this.

Occasionally, though, those emails do more harm than good. Obviously, the crackpots who demand that I review their PublishAmerica masterpiece -- and then just won't let it go -- are among the worst. But sometimes even well-meaning authors say the wrong thing.

For example, I find it irritating when I get a message that reads:

"You should have received a copy of my new book by now. I look forward to reading your review."

Or, even worse:

"I hope you enjoyed reading my book. Please let me know when the review will appear."

I don't know if this is something they teach in management school, or whether some advice guru suggested it or what, but it's annoying.

I am not susceptible to the Jedi Mind Trick. I will not review your book just because you sent it to me. (I get a couple hundred books a month and only review a handful of them.) Most of the time, I can't even read your book. I wish I could. I wish I could read everything and write about most of it. But that's not reality.

Contacting reviewers is fine. Asking if they received the books is fine. (Although you may not get a response.) Anything more than that is probably not a good idea.

Negative reviews

In the comments section of the post below about Why books get reviewed, Paul Guyot asks the following:

Why do you think -- at least in the mystery/crime world -- that the "bad" review has become so rare?

I'm not talking about being mean or nasty, etc. I'm talking about a critic doing their job: reviewing both good and bad books. Why did that die?

It's a good question, and one I've been thinking about a lot over the past few months since this came up in a discussion. Because I think it's true: there aren't very many negative reviews written of crime novels, and there probably should be.

So here's what I've come up with. There are several factors that come into play at various times. Not all of these would apply to any particular reviewer, or any particular book. But at least some of them affect all of us.

• To write a negative review, you have to finish reading the book. If the book stinks, you don't want to finish reading it. This is the main reason I don't write more negative reviews. There are so many books waiting to be read that I hate spending the time reading something when I don't think it's any good.
• Lack of review space. With the significant decline in space devote to books coverage, there is pressure to use that coverage to promote the good rather than pan the bad. I can't really argue with that decision. If I have to choose between recommending a good book or scorning a bad book, I'll nearly always choose the former.
• Lousy books aren't very interesting to write about. If a book is spectacularly bad, then maybe there's some good material there. But if a book is simply mediocre -- and this is the case for most of the bad books published -- then there's not really a lot to be said about it. Writing a review of a book that's bad, but only in a dull sort of way, is nearly as tedious as reading it -- and the review wouldn't be much fun to read either.
• Nobody likes negative reviews. The publisher, the publicist, the author, the people at the newspaper, even the readers themselves -- just pan a high-profile book, especially one that other people liked, and watch the hate mail come in. So there is no encouragement to write them, but there is encouragement to write positive reviews. (Note: I'm not saying this is a reason not to write negative reviews. But I believe it does influence people.)
• Praise inflation. After reading 5 books in a row that aren't very good, even a halfway decent book will seem good by comparison. Thus, books that might otherwise receive negative or mixed reviews get edged up the quality scale.
• The "out on a limb" factor. It takes a certain amount of self-assuredness, and confidence in one's taste, to go out on a limb and state that a book other people like sucks. It's easy to doubt your instincts when you hate a book that other people are proclaiming is great. Nobody wants to look like an idiot. So it can be easier just to keep your mouth shut.
• "Bandwagonism." There is a certain herd mentality among reviewers, some of whom are a little too eager to jump on board and praise whatever or whomever is getting the most buzz. Janet Maslin raves about an author in the Times? A lot of reviewers follow. An unknown author is suddenly the flavor of the month? The reviewers come out of the woodwork to praise her, eager to show that they, too, are part of the in-crowd.
• It can be hard to publicly proclaim that a book someone worked really hard on is not very good. This is a tough one for me. Even if I know in my heart that a book stinks, it's hard for me to tell everybody that. I think it's part of our culture -- you know the old saying, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all?" Well, I was raised to believe that. And it can be hard to overcome. Some critics get off on uncapping the poisoned pen, but I don't care for it myself.

What do you folks think, as readers? Do you want to see more negative reviews? Would you pay attention to them? Would you rather have a reviewer tell you that Book A is awesome or Book B is horrible?

Why books don't get reviewed

In an effort to find out why books don't get reviewed (and why they do), I convened a meeting of the Critics Cabal, that super-secret organization of book reviewers that actually controls the publishing world. Cabal members in attendance included myself, Carol Memmott, Oline Cogdill, Sarah Weinman, Tod Goldberg, Hallie Ephron, Dick Lochte and Clea Simon.

I posed to them a two-part question: Why do books get reviewed? Why don't books get reviewed? Here are some of the responses to the second question. (The first question was dealt with in a separate post.)

• NOT ENOUGH BOOK REVIEW SPACE.
• Too many books are published. "Little" books in particular get lost in the shuffle.
• The book is mediocre. Most critics aren't looking to write ho-hum reviews of so-so books.
• It has a lousy beginning. (Critics tend to stop reading books soon if the first 50 pages or so don't grab them.)
• Weak writing. (One-dimensional characters, reliance on clichés, hackneyed dialogue, profligate use of adverbs, muddled POV, etc.)
• Unappealing subject matter. (This varies from critic to critic, but such topics as serial killers, children-in-jeopardy books, and novels featuring torture were cited.)
• The author's last book wasn't very good or very popular. (Although if the book was spectacularly bad, the new one might get reviewed.)
• Series novels in which the protagonist doesn't change/develop over time. (Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels were cited.)
• The author or publicist is annoying. (Constant pestering, phone calls, bad b.o., etc.)
• It's a PBO, POD or some other set of initials; it was self-published, vanity-published, not-really-published. (Note: These factors vary somewhat from critic to critic. For example, I review PBOs, as do some of the others.)
• The book received no publisher support. If nobody's heard of it, it probably won't get reviewed.
• There's no art available for the book. (Virtually every newspaper runs art of either the book or the author with a review. If none is available, the review gets scrapped.)
• And that oldie but a goodie...The reviewer never received a copy of the book.

Why books get reviewed

In an effort to find out why books get reviewed (and why they don't), I convened a meeting of the Critics Cabal, that super-secret organization of book reviewers that actually controls the publishing world. Cabal members in attendance included myself, Carol Memmott, Oline Cogdill, Sarah Weinman, Tod Goldberg, Hallie Ephron, Dick Lochte and Clea Simon.

I posed to them a two-part question: Why do books get reviewed? Why don't books get reviewed? Here are some of the responses to the first question. (The second question will be dealt with in a separate post.)

• It's a great book. Critics are always looking for interesting, exciting, original, excellent books to write about.
• The author is notable, well-regarded, an award-winner, trying something new (see Benjamin Black), doesn't publish very often (see Richard Price), has interesting credits, etc. Basically, there's something about the author that calls out, "We need to review this book."
• Something about the book is new/different/unusual. Could be the characters, the setting, the basic outline of the plot, the topic (especially true for non-fiction).
• It's the "buzz book" du jour. Some books get reviewed because everyone is talking about them, reviewing them, etc.
• It's by a debut author. (Nearly everyone responded that they're always on the lookout for great books by new authors.)
• It's by a local author. Chicago authors are more likely to get reviewed in the Chicago papers, New England authors in the Boston papers, etc. This also applies somewhat to authors who will be appearing in the area.
• It received really favorable pre-publication reviews (PW, Kirkus or Booklist).
• It was recommended by a trusted publicist, editor, author or critic. Critics are influenced by word-of-mouth just like everyone else. (One person specifically mentioned the books that Stephen King recommends.)
• It has significant publisher support, advertising, etc.
• And finally..."Sometimes, I just like the cover." (Yes, this really does matter. Unfortunately, many galleys don't actually have covers on them, just plain paper wraps.)

To sum up, the reasons why books get reviewed fall mostly into three broad categories:

• The quality of the book
• Who the author is
• Pre-publication buzz

Only one of those is something that authors really have control over. So what's the best advice I can give you on how to get reviewed? Write a great book. Next up: Why books don't get reviewed.

"How do I get my book reviewed?"

I originally wrote this for the blog of author/critic Clea Simon.

The perennial question, the thing critics always hear, but never have a very good answer for: "How do I get my book reviewed?"

When I'm being flippant, I say, "You don't." With review space drying up like the Gobi Desert, the number of books being reviewed in the major newspapers is probably smaller than it's every been before. So realistically, your chance of getting reviewed in those outlets is pretty damn small.

That doesn't mean you have to give up. But it does mean that you might need to change your expectations and start looking in different places. You shouldn't discount the big papers, but you shouldn't count on them too much either.

On the other hand, local newspapers often have potential for review coverage. (Most newspapers like to write about local authors.) Even if the paper doesn't ordinarily review books, that doesn't mean they won't do it. Contact the Features Editor and make your pitch to him/her. Even there, though, the amount of space is small and the number of books is large.

You should consider popular websites and blogs. Online reviews don't have the readership of the major newspapers, nor do they carry the same cachet. There are, however, a lot of them and they review many more books. The important thing is to target the right sites -- you want those that have a lot of traffic, that review books (or will consider reviewing them), that appeal to the kind of people who would buy your book, etc.

The various niche magazines (like mystery magazines or whatever is applicable to your type of book and its subject; for example, if you've written a thriller about a fisherman, considering pitching fishing magazines) are also worth pursuing. Just keep in mind that they require a significant amount of lead time, so you'll need to make sure they get the book early.

Your publicist should be doing this stuff for you... But we all know that often doesn't happen. So what do you do? I advise authors to (cautiously) contact reviewers themselves. If it's done in the right way, I don't think anyone would be offended. It might be a waste of time, but on the other hand it doesn't require much of an investment. You don't need to sell yourself or the book. Just a simple email with the pertinent details is sufficient:

"Dear So-and-So:
My new mystery novel is being published June 15 in hardcover by Poisoned Pen Press. It's about a one-eyed private detective from Mars who's trying to solve a nasty ring of catnappings taking place at bed and breakfasts in the wine country.
May I have my publicist send you a copy for review consideration?"

 

Once you do that, leave it alone. If you don't hear back, move on. If you do hear back, make sure your publicist (or you) sends a copy of the book. After that, leave it alone. Don't follow up. I would recommend you not attempt any further contact with the reviewer. It's unlikely to help your cause.

If the reviewers are aware of your book, you've done all you can. You need to be realistic about your chances for much review coverage. There are hundreds of mysteries published each month, but only space to review a handful of them. Even if you've written a good book, the math is against you. But if you persist -- and if you write a great book -- people will eventually notice. Good luck!

The reviewers speak out

For an article in the current issue of the Sisters-in-Crime newsletter, author and critic Hallie Ephron interviewed several top mystery/thriller critics. She asked them questions such as "How do you pick the books to review," "Do you review hardbacks and paperbacks," "Does the author's gender, ethnicity or nationality affect whether you might review a book" and other interesting stuff.

The reviewers she interviewed are: herself, me, Oline Cogdill, Sarah Weinman, Eddie Muller, Joe Hartlaub and Enid Schantz.

Here's a sample question:

Do you review self-published books?

OC, HE: No.

JH: I wouldn't exclude a self-published book.

DJM: No. The overall level of quality has been too low to justify the time.

EM: I reviewed one in my first column and bookstores hated it: "We can't stock this book so you're not helping us out." Readers appreciated it. If I come across a book I think has merit, I don't care if it's print on demand.

ES: Never. Ten years ago we might have been willing to give non-traditionally published authors a try, but [now] we have a hard enough time choosing from established and exception­ally promising new authors.

SW: Just on pure volume I can't deal with self-published books.

The piece contains a lot of good information -- and reflects a surprising amount of agreement on the part of the reviewers on most of the topics.

You can view a PDF file of the newsletter here.

Article about top "reviewers" at Amazon

Slate has an interesting piece on the top "reviewers" at Amazon. I use that term loosely, as I don't really know what it is these people are doing. Surely they're not reviewing books in any meaningful sense.

(The article cites that infamous fraud Harriet Klausner's statistics: "[an average of] 45 book reviews per week over the last five years." Perhaps someone actually believes a person can review over 2000 books per year. I am not one of those people.)

The part I found most interesting is how the article explains that the whole premise behind Amazon's reviews -- customers helping customers -- is bogus.

I used to post my reviews to Amazon, as a sort of public service to buyers, but eventually I decided there was little point in it. I do love the company in general, though. I buy most of my books, and a ton of other stuff, there.

Ask the Critic: Time spent reading/writing

C.T. Henry asks:

How many books do you read in a week?  How much time do you spend writing vs. reading?

I already shared some numbers in my post summing up my stats for 2007. But, in general, I try to read 3 books per week. I didn't quite make it there this last year, but I was close. It takes me a fair bit of reading time to get to that, as I'm not an especially fast reader.

I don't spend much time writing reviews in an average week. Although I'm a slow reader, I'm a fast writer, and can produce a column or single-book review in a couple of hours at most. So I spend far more time reading the books than writing the reviews.

Outtake from Yorba Linda Star interview

Here is a question from the interview I did with Patti McCoy Jacob that was cut for reasons of space. I thought it might be interesting to some.

PMJ: Any advice for someone interested in reviewing books but unsure how to begin?

DJM: Read, read, read. Read everything you can get your hands on, including reviews. Find critics whose work speaks to you and study their reviews. Figure out what they're doing and how they're doing it. Then experiment with expressing your own thoughts about a book; what was good, what was not-so-good. You not only have to be able to form interesting insights about the book, you have to be able to express them in an interesting way. It's something few people seem to be able to do well.

I would also advise people that the only reason to write reviews is because you love books and have thoughts about them you want to share. Don't do it because you think there's money in it. There isn't.

Most Reviewed Books of 2007

PublishersMarketplace compiled a list of the 50 Most Reviewed Books of 2007. (#1 was Run, by Ann Patchett, reviewed 28 times.)

Only three books that could loosely be considered crime fiction were on the list, and they were all written by literary authors:

3   The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)     26 reviews
18   New England White, by Stephen L. Carter (Alfred A. Knopf)      20 reviews
43   Christine Falls, by Benjamin Black (Henry Holt)      15 reviews

(Harry Potter came it at #37, with 16 reviews. It was the only book on the list that I read.)

Ask the Critic: Contacting reviewers

Anonymous asks:

I'm published by a small, reputable press that doesn't do a lot of mailings. My publisher will, however, send out ARCs or review copies if I request them. How best can I approach critics to ask if they would consider a copy? Is there any way to do this without annoying and alienating them?

I have long maintained that it is perfectly acceptable for authors to contact reviewers to inquire about sending a book for possible review. I've never heard anyone complain about this, as long as it's done in a polite, respectful and non-pushy manner. (I even did a poll of prominent reviewers to confirm this a couple years ago.)

I would recommend a simple email like the following: "I have a book coming out November 15th from Five Star Press. It's called Blah, Blah, Blah and it's about this, that and the other thing. May I have the publisher send you a copy?"

That's it. Don't make a sales pitch, don't say how great it is, don't include blurbs, don't refer them to your website or attach a press release. Just be concise, give the basic info and take your shot.

If someone's going to get upset about that, they're probably a grump and wouldn't review your book anyway.

If you decide to do this, make sure to include the following information: Author name, book title, publication date, publisher and a brief synopsis. Those are the facts that I need to know in order to make a decision.

If you've got a question for Ask the Critic, please send it in.

More on Kirkus Discoveries

I dug up a few articles from 2004-5 about the launch of Kirkus' paid review program, in case anyone is interested in reading some of the early reactions. (I didn't find any more recent commentary, so I suppose this is old news.) As you'd expect, nearly everyone thought it was a bad idea.

Ron Charles in the Christian Science Monitor
David Milofsky in the Denver Post
Edward Wyatt in the New York Times

My favorite revelation was a quote in the Times from Jerome Kramer, managing director of the company that publishes Kirkus: "If someone is desperately unhappy with the review and wanted it to be removed from KirkusDiscoveries.com, I imagine we would do that."

Satisfaction guaranteed! That's what I want from my book reviews. (At least this presupposes that the review could be negative.)

If these books are worthy of review, Kirkus should write about them in the magazine. If not, they shouldn't be charging these people to bury a review on their website.

Paying for book reviews

During one of the many debates on vanity publishing over at Lee Goldberg's always entertaining blog, a vanity press author commented at length about his positive experience with the process. I think that pathway is a bad one for nearly all prospective authors, but that's not the point of this post.

During the discussion, it came out that the writer in question had paid Kirkus Discoveries $300 for a review -- which, not surprisingly, was a rave. The author blurbed this review prominently on his website and obviously took great pride in it.

Folks, I can't tell you enough what a mistake it is to purchase a book review. A Kirkus Discoveries review is like a real Kirkus Review in the same way that chicken salad is like chicken shit. A purchased review has less than no credibility; it actually diminishes the reputation of the work and the author, rather than bolstering it. It shows that the author is naive about the publishing industry, and that s/he couldn't get any legitimate reviews.

The people who buy them argue that they are fair and honest reviews, not snow jobs at all. (Kirkus maintains the same thing.) Yet when you read through the Kirkus Discoveries reviews, you'll find that they're surprisingly positive. (Remember, these are reviews of vanity published works. Are we really supposed to believe that the overall quality of vanity press novels is really that high?)

I read the 10 most recent reviews posted on their website and 8 of them were positive. Only 2 of them were mixed reviews, and they were still positive enough to recommend the book. By comparison, read the latest 10 reviews from the real Kirkus and see how many of them are positive. But, of course, those people didn't pay $300 each for the critique.

If anyone is thinking of buying one of these reviews, I hope they'll reconsider. There are outlets that will review vanity press works. Granted, they are few and with little reputation, but they do exist. Any one of them would be better than paying for a review.

Why your book didn't get reviewed

One of the questions writers often ask is, "Why didn't my book get reviewed?" There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the main ones is also one of the most surprising:

Because the reviewer never got a copy of the book.

Case in point: A bestselling crime writer has a book coming out in 10 days or so. I reviewed a couple books by this author previously, and was generally pleased with them, so this latest work was on my radar screen as a strong contender for review.

(My editor likes it when I can include a bestseller or two in my roundup column, so I'm always on the lookout for candidates that I think are worthy of review.)

The problem is, I never received a copy of the book. Usually I get ARCs of upcoming titles at least a couple months before the release date. This is necessary so that reviewers can plan and write their reviews. (My lead time for deciding what I'm going to review is usually at least a month before my column actually appears in the newspaper.)

I don't know if the publisher didn't print galleys or they just didn't send me one. I do know that for the author's last book, which I reviewed, I never did get a galley and had to practically pull their teeth to get a copy of the book to review. I also know that they did print ARCs -- they just didn't bother to send me one.

So I contacted the author directly and asked him to make sure his publicist sent me a book as soon as possible. He said he'd take care of it.

Well, a finished copy of the book finally arrived yesterday. Unfortunately, I've already written my September column, and obviously this book wasn't included. So I won't be reviewing it. I doubt I'll even have time to read it, as I've now moved on to October and November books.

Frustrating? A little, I suppose. But I just read a different book and wrote about that instead. The real losers are the author, the author's fans and the publisher. This is not an isolated incident either; it happens all the time.

No matter how long I work in this business, I don't think I'll ever understand why publishers do the things they do.

Do rave reviews sell more books?

I.J. Parker asked a question over on Sarah's blog that got me thinking: why don't rave reviews translate into bigger sales for books?

(We'll assume for argument's sake that the premise is true. It's hard to measure the relationship between reviews and sales, as there is no direct method of tracking them. But I think that there is to at least some extent a disconnect between the two. I do believe that reviews sell books, but I'm not sure that the intensity of preference expressed by the reviewer makes much of a difference.)

I think that for most readers, reviews function more in the manner of advertising, rather than as specific motivators to buy. They make the consumer aware of the product, but they don't necessarily compel them to buy it. Therefore, the relative enthusiasm the reviewer expresses for the book, whether positive or negative, doesn't matter that much.

People see a review and it puts the book in their mind. So perhaps if they have some degree of interest in the author already, or if they see some subsequent reinforcement of that image, they might decide to buy the book. But I don't think there is a large number of readers who read a rave review and then, as a direct result, go out and buy the book. I would like to think that we, as reviewers, have that kind of influence, but I don't believe we do.

Obviously, this is all speculation, as we don't have the data to test the premise. (Although a few economists tried a while back, using some fuzzy Amazon data, and concluded that the positive or negative quality of the review did have an impact on sales.)

Perhaps the overall problem is a larger one, namely that readers don't pay a lot of attention to book reviews in the first place. I also don't think the average newspaper consumer is a careful reader of reviews. They'll be flipping through the paper and see a review of the new Dan Brown book and think, "Oh cool, the guy who wrote The Da Vinci Code has a new one out" but not stop to appreciate that the review is actually saying it's a piece of garbage.

I also wonder if the "grade inflation" in reviews -- too many raves for too many lousy books, a phenomenon I see all the time -- has caused consumers simply to discount the praise reviewers bestow upon books. This is also a significant risk, I think, of the proliferation of amateur online reviews, which are generally ill-considered and overly enthusiastic, if not outright puffery (paging Harriet Klausner).

I don't have any hard answers here, but I find it interesting to think about. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

Do statistics matter?

In my comments to yesterday's post, I made reference to the statistics collected by Sisters in Crime. That organization, dedicated to raising the awareness of female authors in the mystery field, conducts what they call the "Review Monitoring Project."

They collect data on dozens of publications, breaking down how many books by men are reviewed, versus how many books by women. (They aren't explicit about whether or not they only count books from the crime genre, but I suspect that they include everything.) Their mission is "to make sure women are reviewed as often as men."

Here are the stats for the two publications I review most frequently for:

Publication                   Percentage Male       Percentage Female
Chicago Sun-Times         64.46                      35.54
Philadelphia Inquirer       59.49                      40.51

The average for all the publications they track is: 56.23% male, 43.77% female.

My personal stats for 2006 were: 61% male, 39% female.
My stats for 2005 were: 55% male, 45% female.

I always make a conscious effort to review as many books by women as I can -- not because of statistics like this, but because I try to provide the best service possible to my readers, and reviewing books by only one sex or the other wouldn't do that.

Something about the whole project makes me uneasy, though. I recognize the importance of overcoming biases whenever possible. If those biases exist regarding review coverage, we need to identify them and figure out ways to overcome them.

But is it important that we have a rigid breakdown where half of all books reviewed are written by men and half by women? (Several of the publications they track have a precise 50-50 split between the sexes, which hardly seems like it could be accidental.)

Should the books themselves be the determining factor, or is the sex of the author a valid criteria for deciding what gets reviewed?

Since I do consider the author's sex when deciding what the write about, I suppose that's my answer. But I'm not sure it's the appropriate one.

Publishers Marketplace's Top Reviewers

Publishers Marketplace has launched a new feature listing the "Top Reviewers" -- those reviewers with 25 or more reviews in their database. They note that they began tracking reviews in October 2002, and they include primarily full-length reviews in major newspapers that post their reviews to the Web.

You have to be a subscriber to see the listings, so I'll share some stats with you here:

David J. Montgomery
28 reviews : 23 positive (82%), 4 neutral (14%), 1 negative (4%)
Philadelphia Inquirer (17); Chicago Sun-Times (5); Boston Globe (4); South Florida Sun-Sentinel (1); Washington Post (1)

(Since they only include full-length reviews, much of my work, which comes in column round-ups, is not included. They also seem to be missing a few that I thought of.)

Here are the stats from some other prominent crime fiction reviewers:

Janet Maslin
382 reviews : 189 positive (49%), 159 neutral (42%), 34 negative (9%)
New York Times (378); Boston Globe (3); Los Angeles Times (1)

Oline H. Cogdill
246 reviews : 189 positive (77%), 28 neutral (11%), 29 negative (12%)
South Florida Sun-Sentinel (246)

Patrick Anderson
191 reviews : 107 positive (56%), 58 neutral (30%), 26 negative (14%)
Washington Post (190); New York Times (1)

Carol Memmott
62 reviews : 50 positive (81%), 8 neutral (13%), 4 negative (6%)
USA Today (62)

Adam Woog
48 reviews : 40 positive (83%), 8 neutral (17%), 0 negative (0%)
Seattle Times (48)

Tom Nolan
44 reviews : 35 positive (80%), 9 neutral (20%), 0 negative (0%)
San Francisco Chronicle (16); Los Angeles Times (16); Wall Street Journal (10); Boston Herald (2)

Betsy Willeford
33 reviews : 11 positive (33%), 22 neutral (67%), 0 negative (0%)
Miami Herald (31); South Florida Sun-Sentinel (1); Houston Chronicle (1)

Paula L. Woods
29 reviews : 23 positive (79%), 3 neutral (10%), 3 negative (10%)
Los Angeles Times (28); Washington Post (1)

I'm pretty high up there on the positive/negative ratio, which is not surprising, since I tend to select books for full-length reviews that I have something good to say about. If the data were included from my round-up pieces, I imagine that percentage would drop.

Even so, I wonder if I write too many positive reviews and not enough negative ones.

Article on the decline of book coverage

Cheryl Reed, my editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, has an excellent article in the paper today about the decline in book coverage. I don't have much hope that all the attention this subject has been getting recently will make much difference. However, at least one newspaper executive still gets it.

Reed writes:

Concerned about the security of the book pages here, I asked Sun-Times Publisher John Cruickshank, a bibliophile and frequent reviewer in these pages, whether there were plans to cut books coverage here. His response: "The Opinion and Books sections of the paper have never attracted much advertising, but they are at the core of any paper's identity and the engagement a paper has with its community. We are committed to these sections because they are integral to the basic character of the Chicago Sun-Times."

Another book review section gone

Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle (of which I am a member), reports that the Atlanta Journal Constitution has eliminated its book editor position, possibly signaling the end of their independent book coverage.

What often happens in situations like this is that paper will continue a modest amount of coverage with wire stories or reviews pulled from other papers like the New York Times. Either that, or sometimes they just stop writing about books altogether.

Whenever newspapers make decisions like this, it always strikes me as being not only penurious, but short-sighted. Even if the powers-that-be don't believe that coverage of literature is worthwhile as a public service, you would think they would support it as an investment in their own future profits.

If newspapers don't help to promote a culture of reading, who do they think is going to read newspapers in the future? On the other hand, by fostering and encouraging a love and respect for reading, they're creating additional consumers for their product.

People buy the newspaper for the sports section, comics, horoscopes and Dear Abby. They don't buy the paper for the editorials, the international reporting or the book reviews. But cultural coverage, like international reporting and editorials, is still a valuable part of the product that newspapers provide.

Most newspapers generate significant revenues and many are quite profitable. Yet somehow too many of them can't seem to devote even a couple of pages to reviews of books. And that's a damn shame.

Books I can't review

I receive daily emails from authors requesting book reviews. I wish I could say yes every time, but unfortunately, the answer is more often no. I receive a couple hundred books a month and review maybe ten of them if I'm lucky.

Most of the time, I don't end up reviewing a book because I ran out of space, didn't have time to read it, didn't have anything to say about it, didn't finish it, didn't like it, or assorted reasons like that. There are some books, however, that I simply can't review.

In order to save all of us some time, here are some examples of the types of books I can't review:

• Books that have already been released. If your book is available by the time you email me, it's too late. I'm always reading at least a month ahead.
• Self-published or vanity press books. This includes anything from PublishAmerica, iUniverse, Lulu, Author House, Xlibris, etc.
• Books from publishers I've never heard of. This is a more flexible rule, but if the publisher isn't included on the approved list from either MWA or ITW, chances are I can't review it.
• Books available only in electronic form.
• Books that are reprints.
• Books that aren't mysteries, thriller or suspense novels. Occasionally I do review something outside the genre, but it's rare enough that you probably shouldn't get your hopes up.
• Although it's not a rule, the chances are slim that I can review a paperback original (PBO). I review more PBOs than more critics (I think), but it still only amounts to a couple a year. So you can query about them if you want, but be prepared for me to decline.

I've dealt with many of the reasons why I can't review these books in the past, but if you have a question, feel free to post a comment and I'll try to respond.

Does crime fiction have lousy characters?

In her New York Times review of Benjamin Black's Christine Falls, author Kathryn Harrison writes:

Mainstream literary novels succeed or fail on the strength of characterization, but noir fiction is less concerned with building complex and believable characters than with creating a medium in which murder and mayhem can thrive. Place is essential to noir, character less so.

That strikes me as nonsense, as the last thing I'm interested in reading is any kind of book (literary, crime, science fiction, picture book) that has weak, undeveloped characters.

If a novel has a great sense of place, or a cool plot, but it has flat, uninspired characters, that's not a very good book. It doesn't matter if it's "genre" or "literary" (whatever those terms actually mean).

I've been seeing a lot of this genre bashing going on lately (and posted about it a week or two ago). Just yesterday, I moderated a panel at the Virginia Festival of the Book that had 5 thriller writers on it. (Barry Eisler, MJ Rose, Lisa Unger, Matthew Jones, Robert Walker)

During the Q&A session, a guy in the audience looked at the panel with what I can only describe as aghast incomprehension and remarked "Listening to you 5 authors talk about the importance of creating characters, it sounds like you're literary writers. But you're supposed to be genre authors!" (I'm paraphrasing -- I think it was even more insulting than that.)

Perhaps the so-called literary folks are feeling the heat. Could it be that the massive sales of crime fiction novels are starting to get to them?

The more I think about it, the more I believe that these snobbish attitudes have more to do with fear and jealousy than anything else.

Advice for the aspiring book reviewer

One of the questions I get asked the most often is "How do I break into the business as a book reviewer?" The idea of getting paid to read books and write about them – coupled with all the free books you receive – is clearly something that interests a lot of people.

Unfortunately, the truth is that it's damn near impossible to get one of these gigs. Even once you do, there's not much work available and the pay ain't that great. (Typical pay for a book review is around $150-$200, unless you're writing for one of the largest papers.)

This is a very odd business. The smaller newspapers – which would be easier to break into – don't run book reviews. Only the larger newspapers – which have the most competition – run reviews. So the whole set-up is bass-ackwards.  (In my case, the first newspaper review I ever wrote was for the Washington Post.)

So if you're thinking about book reviewing as a job, you should probably think again. But it can still be a fun and rewarding pursuit (hobby? avocation?), assuming you've got the talent to make it work.

The first thing you need is some top-quality clips of reviews that you can show editors. These need to be well-written, insightful, professional and written in a journalistic style. Basically, they need to be of the same quality and nature as the majority of the reviews you read in the publication you hope to write for. You should have a handful of different reviews, including both raves and pans.

(Most of the reviews I read online would never hack it in a print publication. In order to succeed as a print reviewer, you have to demonstrate that you're as good as the people already doing the job, so your clips have to be excellent. Work on them until they're as fine as you can make them.)

It would also be helpful to have a compelling hook to get people interested in the first place. Something that you can set you apart, like you're a well-known blogger (some of the more-prominent bloggers have had success breaking into reviewing lately) or you're a published novelist or a professor of literature or an expert on medieval France. (Your hook, of course, should be related to the type of books you want to write about.)

When I started out, I didn't have much of a hook. I ran a mystery book review site (Mystery Ink), and I used those clips as samples of my work when talking to editors. Frankly, it seems like a miracle that anyone was interested – so maybe there's hope for others yet.

Once you've got your clips, here's what I recommend you do: Find out who the book review editor for the publication you're interested in is. Email him/her saying briefly who you are and what you do, and what your credentials are. Tell him/her you're interested in writing book reviews and ask if you can send some clips. Be prepared to hear no, or, even more likely, to hear nothing.

There might be a better way, but that's what I've always done. Chances of success are very low. Most of the time I get turned down, too, even with my track record. But it is possible. I see new names popping up all the time. You've got to be good, though, and you've got to be persistent.

On the other hand, if all you're interested in is reviewing books, you can start your own website or blog, or join up with one of the existing ones, and contribute that way. Granted, you're only going to be one quiet voice in the midst of the cacophony of crappy reviews that fill the internet. But if you're good, and if you have something interesting to say, people will pay attention. There is always a shortage of quality book reviews.

Mail call

I've mentioned often on this blog that I get a lot of books. Well, yesterday was a banner day here at Crime Reviewing Central. I got packages from the USPS, UPS, FedEx and DHL. Here's the breakdown:

Hardcover books -- 10
ARCs for hardcovers -- 4
ARCs for trade paperbacks -- 1
ARCs for paperbacks -- 2
Manuscript -- 1
Total books: 18

Here's what I plan to read:

Hardcovers -- 3 (Including 1 I've already read)
ARCs -- 2 (Including 1 I've already got)
Manuscript -- 1 (If I have time)
Total books planning to read: 6

That's actually a fairly high percentage of good stuff for this batch. The book I'm most looking forward to reading of these is Lee Child's new one, Bad Luck and Trouble.

Reviewers over-praising books, Pt. 2

In response to my post below about "Why reviewers over-praise books" there were two comments I wanted to highlight and address.

Brian F. asked:

Do you think gushing reviews come from a "need" to create a pull quote? When you're writing a review, do you ever say to yourself "If they decide to use this to publicize the book, how will this sentence look?"

Alexandra Sokoloff wrote:

Maybe this is just a Hollywood thing, but there are film reviewers who are known to hyperbolically praise everything because that guarantees they'll get their name and quote in the ads. Is there maybe some similar motivation with some book reviewers?

I'm cynical, but practical: a lot of reviewers also aspire to writing careers, and widely-read reviews are a good way for them to build a name and connections.

I think this might come into play to a certain extent. But I'm not sure it's a predominant cause, since pull quotes from book reviews almost never mention the reviewer's name. I get blurbed all the time, but the quotes always just say "Chicago Sun-Times" or "Philadelphia Inquirer" or whatever.

My name has only appeared on blurbs a few times that I can remember, and that's out of dozens and dozens of quotes of mine that have been used.

There is still an ego boost that comes from seeing one's review quoted, even if it's not attributed by name. No doubt. But I do think that the anonymous quality of them lessens the motivation.

Pull quotes are something that I do warn myself about in the back of my mind when I'm writing reviews, and I try not to write anything that would be an obvious blurb.

On the other hand, I do try to write active, engaging reviews with positive, punchy phrasing in them (assuming, of course, it's a positive review). That's what my readers are looking for, I think, so that's what I give them. But I am aware of how it can be used for promotional purposes.

I still think that the best way to get attention as a reviewer is to write thoughtful, sincere, quality reviews. That's what you build a career on, not heaping unwarranted praise. Granted, some folks might not be savvy enough to realize this.

Why reviewers over-praise books

In the comments section to my post "Is it just me?," where I questioned whether reviewers are getting soft, author Elaine Flinn made an interesting point:

I don't think reviewers are getting lazy - I think they're overwhelmed by the sheer number of books being published now - and so many of them are carbon copies with voices that are far from original.

This is a keen observation, and it relates directly to one of the things I brought up in the original post; namely, whether or not reviewers over-praise books, which I think they often do. And one of the major reasons that they do is because of the volume of books being published.

Since I am a crime fiction reviewer of some prominence, the publishers are usually quite eager to send me their books. I get stacks and stacks of them, probably an average of 50 or so every week. (I haven't counted in a long time, but the last time I did, that's what I got.)

A large percentage of those books aren't very good. I'm sure somebody likes them, but for whatever reason, they're not to my taste. This leaves me, or any reviewer, in the unenviable position of wading through stacks of dross in the hopes of finding something interesting to read, and hopefully worthy of being reviewed.

After a while, the cumulative effect of so many disappointing books starts to add up. It can get discouraging. But then lightning strikes and a gem is found amidst the sand. When that happens, the reviewer seizes on the book like a prospector at his first sign of color.

"Eureka!" he cries, and dashes off to write a glowing review. After having read so many books that weren't fresh, or weren't interesting, or weren't well-written, when the reviewer finds one that is, the book looks all the better by comparison.

Thus, books will often receive kudos that they don't necessarily deserve based on their own merits. This is one of the reasons it is so important for reviewers to maintain their own standards for quality, and to make them as objective as they can -- in what is always, and must be, a subjective field.

(There are some other reasons reviewers over-praise books, and perhaps I'll discuss them in the future.)

Is it just me?

Every Sunday morning, I go to Sarah Weinman's blog to check her round-up of all the major mystery reviews. When I see a book that looks interesting (something I've read, something I plan to read, something I'm curious about), I'll click through and read the review. (Note: I don't usually do this if it's a book I plan to review -- but by the time someone else's review runs, mine would probably be done anyway.)

Lately I've been noticing how much I disagree with the reviews I'm reading. The same thing goes for the PW reviews that I see on Amazon. Reviewers are heaping praise on books that I find to be, at best, merely average -- and often they're much worse than that.

This leaves me wondering: are reviewers getting soft or am I just turning into a grumpy old man?

I don't think I'm being any more curmudgeonly than before. I still find plenty of books that I enjoy and that I would feel comfortable giving glowing reviews, too. But I can't help but be surprised at all the crap that people are heaping praise on.

Same thing for many of the Best of 2006 lists that I read. I thought that last year was just okay for crime fiction; hardly a banner year. There were a lot of good books, but few great ones -- and an awful lot of truly bad ones.

But when I've looked over the lists that people put together, I've seen plenty of titles that that were disappointing, if not mediocre; lots of books that I simply gave up on reading.

So all of this makes me wonder: are reviewers getting soft? Are people becoming reluctant to pan books (or, at least, give mixed reviews to books), unless they're written by Michael Crichton or Thomas Harris?

I know the temptation to over-praise books, subconsciously or otherwise, and I know some of the reasons why it happens. But it seems to me that the plaudits being doled out lately are above and beyond.

Snarky reviews

What's with all the snarkiness in reviews lately?

I just read this line in a Publishers Weekly review of a debut thriller: "Despite some clunky expository dialogue (practically a genre requisite)..."

It is? Thrillers are required to have clunky dialogue? Has this reviewer read many thrillers? I doubt it.

Earlier in the week, we had Janet Maslin's review of Marcus Sakey's The Blade Itself, which can be summarized as: "Marcus Sakey has written a pretty good book, the ideas for which he ripped off from Dennis Lehane, Joseph Finder, George Pelecanos and Elmore Leonard. Although it is occasionally an entertaining story, Sakey is not as good a writer as Lehane. Nor, for that matter, is he as good as Leonard."

Just because Sakey lists some writers he likes on his website, Maslin assumes he's copying them? She somehow knows that his voice is not his own, based on reading one novel? She assumes that he is cravenly creating an amalgam of better writers because he worked in advertising, and is thus suspect from the start?

Patrick Anderson, who doesn't know the difference between a mystery and a thriller, rails against the thriller authors "who write what can generously be called fluff, deliberately dumb books filled with cliches, improbable events, inane dialogue and crowd-pleasing gimmicks that have nothing to do with the real world."

I'm all for panning lousy books, but that statement not only belittles writers who are quite likely trying their best (how many people deliberately write dumb books?), but also insults the people who read them.

I know the temptation to write snarky reviews, and have on rare occasion succumbed to it myself. But it's like eating junk food. It might feel good at the time, but ultimately it's bad for you, and if you've got any conscience, you'll just wind up regretting it later.

Of course, considering that Maslin writes for the Times and Anderson writes for the Post -- and that I'd be pleased to write for either of those publications -- they must know something that I don't.

Perhaps it's time to send off for my poison pen...

I give up

Folks, it's time for me to find a new avocation.

Lev Grossman, literary critic for Time magazine, has proclaimed Harriet Klausner "one of the world's most prolific and influential book reviewers."

She's as prolific as diarrhea, but if that fraud is influential, then clearly I'm in the wrong business.

Happy holidays!  :)

The thought of the day

From critic Mike Ripley:

"I am always being accosted by crime writers who announce themselves and then say 'You haven't reviewed my new book' to which I usually answer 'There's no need to thank me.'"

(Passed along by Dick Adler.)

(In case you were wondering...Yes, there is a cabal of critics who all communicate with each other. That's how we decide which books get the good reviews.)

Do book reviews sell books?

Last night I read the Sunday edition of the New York Times Book Review. This was something of a rarity for me, as I don't read many book reviews. I like book reviews, but I have a lot of demands on my time, so I usually spending my free time reading books instead of reviews.

But Marilyn Stasio had reviews of some books that I'd also reviewed, so I wanted to check those out. She had an interesting column in which she actually made it obvious that she liked some books (Michael Connelly's and Robert Ward's, especially).

Then I saw that Christopher Buckley, one of my favorite writers, had a review of a book called The Real Animal House.

It turns out that one of the screenwriters of the classic film wrote a memoir about his real-life experiences in a frat at Dartmouth that helped inspire the movie. Buckley says the book is hilarious, and he's a guy whose comedy judgment I trust. After all, he's written plenty of hilarious things himself (especially Thank You for Smoking*) so he ought to know.

So I clicked over to Amazon and bought it. Before reading the review, I'd never heard of the book and even if I had, I wouldn't have bought it. But a reviewer I trust said it was good, so I thought I'd give it a try.

Hopefully, that's what all book reviews can do.

*It appears that Thank You for Smoking is out of print. How is that possible? Didn't the publisher even reissue a tie-in copy for the movie?

Edit: Thank You for Smoking is in print. You can find it on Amazon here. Thanks to Mark in the comments section for pointing that out!

The decline of book coverage

Jerome Weeks has an interesting piece on the Collapse of Books Coverage in newspapers. As a veteran of the newspaper business -- and a casualty of its short-sightedness -- Weeks is in an excellent position to comment on this topic. So I recommend you read his post.

I've always thought that this is one area where the powers-that-be at the nation's newspapers are really blowing a big opportunity, both to provide a valuable service, and to advance their own cause as well.

Is it such a leap of imagination to think that covering books and writing in newspapers might help attract and cultivate people who are interested in reading -- presumably the same people who might buy a newspaper in the first place?

After all, most people don't read, don't care about reading, and don't give a whit about newspapers. On the other hand, people who go out of their way to read a newspaper might actually have an interest in reading something else as well, and therefore might like to see it covered in the paper.

But I suppose that's too simplistic for the bean counters.*

*No offense to the nice bean counters, who actually love books, like my wife.

The list that wouldn't die -- and a new blog

Jerome Weeks, formerly the book critic for the Dallas Morning News, has started a blog to share his thoughts on publishing, books and literacy.

One of the first topics he visited is my ever-popular list of the 10 Greatest Detective Novels. He then followed that up with a second post, the latter including his own list of favorite literary thrillers.

I could quibble and say that the books he cites are, for the most part, mysteries (or noir novels), not thrillers...But it's a very good list, so why complain?

He also has some very interesting commentary that I found thought-provoking. I didn't need another blog to read, but I think I'm going to enjoy this one.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Jerome.

Ten Commandments of Getting a Book Reviewed

As part of the fun over at Buzz, Balls & Hype, I offer up my Ten Commandments of Getting a Book Reviewed. It's padded out a little, I suppose -- I had trouble coming up with ten. When M.J. Rose gave me the assignment, I replied (in my best Mel Brooks voice), "Ten? Does it have to be ten? Why can't there be eight commandments?" But apparently it was written in stone.

Let me know what you think!

Now here's a racket I should get in on

Tico Publishing, some small press I've never heard of, will give you a review of your book for only $29.95.

Do you need, or would you like, to have your book reviewed? Not having much luck getting them on your own? We understand.

For $29.95, we'll deliver a 200-500 word full-length review to you within 7 days - 14 days (depending on the length of the manuscript and backlog of submitted work).

There's probably a bigger waste of 30 bucks for an aspiring writer, but none immediately come to mind. Giving it to PublishAmerica, I suppose, would qualify.

I'd consider going into this business myself, but there's no way in hell I'm writing a 500-word review of some lousy book for only $30!

Somewhere, P.T. Barnum is smiling.

Happy Anniversary!

I realized a little while ago that I missed my anniversary. No, not the important one. I never miss that. Rather, my three-year anniversary as the mystery/thriller critic for the Chicago Sun-Times.

I wrote my first monthly round-up column for the paper back in July 2003. Since then, I've written thirty-one total columns for them, including reviews of one hundred fifty-nine books. (Assuming I counted right.)

How I got the position in the first place was really a matter of luck. I was in the right place at the right time and took advantage of the opportunity. I had started writing newspaper reviews earlier in 2003, including a handful of stand-alone reviews for the Sun-Times. (A tip of the hat to my old pal Roger Ebert for helping me land that gig.)

That summer, the person who previously held the position of mystery critic became ill and had to resign. (I'm embarrassed to say that I don't remember the man's name. I never knew him.) When that happened, I offered to Henry Kisor, the book editor at the time, to assume the position, if the need was there.

Henry told me that the position of mystery critic was usually filled by someone who already wrote for the paper. He said they'd probably be sending out the word through the staff to see if anyone was interested in taking it over. In the meantime, though, if I wanted to write a couple of columns, he'd be glad to have me do them.

So now, here we are... Three years later, and I'm still doing them. Since then the Sun-Times has gone through a lot of changes. It has a new owner, the book section has shrunk and been tarted up, reviewers have been let go, there's a new book editor...  But I'm still plugging away, doing my column every month.

Every once in a while, I think of giving it up. I seriously considered quitting earlier this year, and was actually somewhat relieved at the thought of it. But so far, I've decided to keep going. Even now that we've got the baby, and it's definitely tougher to get all the reading done, I'm staying with it.

Part of why is because I'm afraid that if I quit, the position will simply go away. The Sun-Times would still review mysteries, I'm sure, but in the number they do now? I don't know. With me onboard, at least, there's a strong and convincing advocate for these books, and I don't want that to go away.

So, Happy Anniversary, Chicago Sun-Times! I think you owe me a present.

So you want to be a book reviewer...

Well, the National Book Critics Circle has some advice for you.

In my experience, assignments are all about clips and relationships, so this advice is right on. You have to know who the editors are, you have to get to know them, and you have to be able to prove to them that you can get the job done.

I broke into print as a critic back when I was an online-only reviewer. I was able to do so because I had professional reviews written in a journalistic style that I could show to editors. Nobody seemed to care that they had only been published on my own website. The quality was good enough to impress them.

The first newspaper my book reviews ever appeared in was the Washington Post. Since then I've written for 8 of the country's 37 largest newspapers. There's no doubt that breaking into this business is difficult, but it can be done.

Be smart, be professional, be polite and be persistent.

Thoughts on book reviewing

I just read an excellent post on reviews and reviewing over on Murderati, written by author and reviewer (and Gumshoe Award nominee) Jeff Cohen. I started to write a reply, but it became so long that I decided to make a post out of it here.

Jeff writes:

The relationship between authors and reviewers is a very complex one. Having done both, I can tell you that neither is easy, neither pays especially well except at the very top of the profession, and both are done for the sheer love of the form in almost every case. I've written reviews that I wish I could take back (all negative ones, even when the film/book/play/record in question was truly awful--I was snarky and shouldn't have been), some that I would hold up for all the world to see and some that, well, I had a deadline and it was a slow week.

I've only written a couple of reviews that I wish I could take back; some too negative and some too positive. Every once in a while, I'll look back at something I've written a year or two later and wonder, "What the hell was I thinking?" I've also written a couple of snarky pieces that I regret.

In those cases, I think most of the time it was, as Jeff says, in a slow week when the deadline was calling. Not that that's an excuse, but it does happen. For the most part, though, I'm generally pleased with the work I've done.

If I write a review, I always read the book, I always finish the book, I always think about the book, and I always try to be fair to the book. I think that should be a mantra for every reviewer.

I try to remember that there's a person on the other end of the book who poured their heart and guts into it. I also try to remember that I have readers who rely upon me for my reviews, and I owe it to them to be as honest and reasoned as I can be.

I don't always get it right -- and that's the curse of being a critic -- but ultimately I think it's worth the effort. Sharing my love for books, and hopefully sharing some small insights I might have about them, is a real joy for me.

After over five years of doing this, and having written about hundreds of books, I still get a kick out of it. Sure, it's a grind, and like any other job, it can be tedious. (And it also doesn't pay well.) But I'm hard-pressed to imagine giving it up.

List of reviewers

An author who's new to the crime fiction genre emailed me recently to ask for my recommendations on critics he should send his new book to. I came up with a good introductory list, so I thought I'd share it with you.

Newspaper Reviewers:

Sarah Weinman -- Baltimore Sun
Hallie Ephron -- Boston Globe
David Montgomery -- Chicago Sun-Times, Philadelphia Inquirer
Dick Adler -- Chicago Tribune
Michele Ross -- Cleveland Plain Dealer
Tom and Enid Schantz -- Denver Post
Janet Maslin -- New York Times
Marilyn Stasio -- New York Times
David Lazarus -- San Francisco Chronicle
Adam Woog -- Seattle Times
Oline Cogdill -- South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Carol Memmott -- USA Today
Tom Nolan -- Wall Street Journal
Patrick Anderson -- Washington Post

Mystery Magazines:

CrimeSpree Magazine
Deadly Pleasures Magazine
Mystery News
Mystery Scene Magazine

Any additions? Please email me. I should put together a list of the best online sites as well, so feel free to send along those recommendations.

Negative reviews

I don't write a lot of negative reviews. One of the main reasons for this is because people don't believe me. It's not a failing on my part, I don't think. People don't believe other critics either. I'm not sure why that is -- perhaps we're all just skeptics or contrarians at heart -- but readers have a perverse tendency to immediately discount any negative review. "Well, that's just your opinion" you can almost hear them saying.

It's true: it is their opinion. But that doesn't mean we should just ignore it. After all, the whole purpose of criticism is for the critic to give his or her opinion. If the critic is a good one, knowledgeable, thoughtful and conscientious, that opinion means something. It doesn't mean they're always right, but it does mean that we should at least listen. Otherwise, why would you read reviews at all?

When I read a review, good or bad, I pay attention to what the critic is saying, particularly the reasons he gives to justify his conclusions. If they seem reasonable and well thought-out, and they seem like the same kinds of factors that I would use to assess the book, I take their views into consideration. Maybe I'll disagree, but at least they've provided food for thought.

Nobody can convince you to like a book you don't like, or vice versa, nor would you want them to. But a good critic can help you choose which books to read, help guide you in some ways of thinking about those books, and possibly provide some insights you might not have thought of yourself. That works in both directions, positive and negative.

Most of us don't listen, though. We don't like to hear that a book is bad. We only want the good news. I fall prey to the temptation the same as anyone else. That's one of the reasons that I tend to single out books to praise rather than scorn.

But sometimes that's not possible. Sometimes my reaction to a book is so strongly negative that I have to break out the acid ink and pen a pan. Such was the case with my first review for the Philadelphia City Paper (edited by crime fiction's biggest name, Duane Swierczynski).

The subject of my review is Tim Dorsey's The Big Bamboo, a book that I didn't care for at all. (If you click through to the review, you'll see why.) I'd never read Dorsey's work before, and after this one, I doubt I ever will again. I disliked it that much.

But don't take my word for it. By all means, pick up a copy and read it yourself. Just don't say I didn't warn you.

Review of Robert Ferrigno's "Prayers for the Assassin"

"Every once in a while, a novel comes along that is so dazzling, so audacious that it seizes you by the scruff of your neck and forces you to sit up and take notice."

So begins my review of Robert Ferrigno's Prayers for the Assassin, the best book I read in 2005, and destined to be one of the best of 2006 as well. (I had to read it a second time in order to write the review, so it qualifies in both years.)

I strongly recommend you give it a try.

Latest Chicago Sun-Times column

My January column ran in the Chicago Sun-Times this morning. It contains the latest books from M.J. Rose (The Delilah Complex), Michele Martinez (The Finishing School), Sean Doolittle (Rain Dogs), Twist Phelan (Spurred Ambition) and Dick Adler (Dreams of Justice: Mysteries as Social Documents).

They all have things to recommend them, but I especially liked M.J. Rose's book, a saucy combination of sex and suspense. It's not the kind of thing I ordinarily read, but I enjoyed it.

Final Tally, Addendum

I extracted a few more statistics to add to my Final Tally for 2005, for those of you who enjoy this kind of thing.

Here are the number of books I reviewed, broken down by publisher. (I combined the various imprints under the main company.)

Bloomsbury: 1 book reviewed
Carroll & Graf: 1 book reviewed
CDS Books: 1 book reviewed
Dennis McMillan: 1 book reviewed
Five Star: 1 book reviewed
Hard Case Crime: 1 book reviewed
HarperCollins (Avon, HarperCollins, Morrow): 9 books reviewed
Holtzbrinck (Forge, Henry Holt, St. Martin's, St. Martin's Minotaur): 12 books reviewed
Hyperion: 2 books reviewed
Kensington (Kensington, Pinnacle): 2 books reviewed
Mira: 1 book reviewed
Penguin (Dutton, Plume, Putnam, Signet, Viking): 8 books reviewed
Point Blank: 1 book reviewed
Poisoned Pen Press: 2 books reviewed
Random House (Ballantine, Bantam, Broadway, Delacorte, Delta, Doubleday, One World): 17 books reviewed
Scholastic: 1 book reviewed
Simon & Schuster (Scribner, Simon & Schuster): 2 books reviewed
Time Warner Book Group (Little Brown, Mysterious Press, Warner): 6 books reviewed

Random House was the big winner, which isn't a surprise, given that they're the largest. The surprising thing I note from these stats is how few books by Simon & Schuster I reviewed. I think that's mostly because they tend not to send me as many of their books as the other publishers do. (Like I always tell the publicists: if I don't get 'em, I can't review 'em.)

The other statistics I have are the number of books I reviewed, broken-down into different book types:

Hardcovers: 57 books reviewed
Trade paperback originials: 5 books reviewed
Paperback originals: 7 books reviewed

Naturally, most of the books I write about are published in hardcover. But I do try to include worthy paperbacks when I can.

I think that's it for the math. You may now return to your regularly scheduled reading.

Final Tally for 2005

I'm something of a compulsive record keeper, if occasionally an absent-minded one. I keep track of the books I read, the articles I write, the movies I watch, etc.

Although I thought that my review output would go down in 2005, it actually increased by 25%. I also wrote two book-related articles that weren't reviews: one a profile of author Libby Fischer Hellmann for the Chicago Sun-Times; the other a round-up on Bouchercon for the Kansas City Star.

My reading output was also up significanly: 40% over 2004's book count. As always, the vast majority were crime fiction novels.

So here are the numbers from last year:

• 175 Books read
• 70 Books reviewed (3 of them more than once)
• 25 Review articles (these are separate articles, often with more than one book in them)
• 1 Author profile
• 1 Journalistic article

Here are the publications I wrote for:

• Chicago Sun-Times: 55 books reviewed in 11 articles, plus 1 profile
• Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: 2 books reviewed in 1 article
• Philadelphia Inquirer: 6 books reviewed in 6 articles
• Boston Globe: 5 books reviewed in 5 articles
• Washington Examiner: 5 books reviewed in 1 article
• National Review Online: 1 book reviewed in 1 article
• Kansas City Star: 1 article

All in all, a productive year on both the reading and reviewing front. Hopefully 2006 will be much the same, with even more productivity in fiction writing.

On Book Reviewing, Part 2

Following up on last week's post, here are the rest of the questions and answers I did earlier this year discussing book reviewing.

3. What does an editor want from a book reviewer (e.g., meeting deadlines, satisfying writing guidelines, etc.)?

If you can’t meet deadlines, you’re not going to last very long as a reviewer. Editors like people who are reliable and pleasant to work with. They don’t like writers who make their job harder. Anything you can do to help out an editor will make you look good in their eyes, whether that means suggesting books to review, or just turning in flawless copy on time.

One thing that I’ve learned after doing this for a while is that good writers who meet deadlines and play by the rules are going to be much more successful than great writers who do not. You may not be able to control how great a writer you are, but you can definitely control how efficient and reliable you are.

Always remember: being pleasant, courteous and dependable go a long way in this (or any other) business.

4. What do you think is the “proper” format and structure of a book review (or is there one)?

Book reviews should strike a balance between summary and analysis. At most, they should contain around 50% summary, and in many cases less is preferable. Reviews should avoid revealing key twists or surprises (the dreaded “spoilers”).

If I could offer general advice, it would be:

Reviews should start by introducing the book and/or the author, and giving a brief overview of your critical analysis. The piece should then summarize the book, giving only what information is necessary to inform the reader. It should then conclude with more in-depth analysis and a final summary of your critical opinion.

This ain’t brain surgery. Simple and straightforward is usually the best policy.

A review should not be 3 paragraphs of summary and one sentence of fuzzy analysis.

On a side note, I don't really see the need for citations from the text in book reviews, but I suppose some people might like them. (I tend to think reviewers just do it to fill space and up the word count.)

5. Should a reviewer insert personal feelings and information into a book review, and if so, how much?

This should be done on a very limited basis, if at all. (And this is probably the number one mistake that rookie reviewers make.)

Reviews that say things like, “I felt this book was good because...” tend to mean very little to me. We all know that a review is an expression of your opinion. That’s a given. So just tell us what that opinion is – and try to back it up.

Taking your review from the individual ("I think this book is good because...") to the general ("This book is good because...") makes your critique more authoritative and useful.

Write like you’re an expert, even if you’re not. Be confident and declarative in your language and tone. The use of qualifying statements and wishy-washy language ruin a review. If you can’t state a firm opinion and justify it, you have no business writing a book review.

Above all, remember that the reader isn’t particularly interested in you; they’re interested in the book and the author. So leave you out of it and focus on the book.

The effect of reviews on book sales

Yale professors Judith A. Chevalier and Dina Mayzlin (Economics and Management, respectively) have released the results of a study they did analyzing the effects of "word of mouth" (in the form of customer reviews) on book sales at Amazon and BN.com. (You can also read a draft of their final paper here.)

Their methodology was not as rigorous as one would ideally wish for (since it's nearly impossible to get hard sales data), but they did come up with some interesting conclusions.

• Overall, reviews are overwhelmingly positive at both sites, and slightly more positive at BN.com.
• Amazon has more reviews, and they are longer and more detailed.
• Prices for the books in their sample were "significantly higher" at BN.com than at Amazon. (This is not apropos to the discussion at hand, but I found it very interesting nonetheless.)
• The addition of favorable reviews at one site increases book sales at that site relative to the other retailer.
• Negative reviews carry more weight with consumers than do positive reviews.
• The impact of a negative review is more powerful in decreasing book sales than a positive review is in increasing sales.

In short, positive reviews boost sales and negative reviews lower sales -- and the effect of the negative reviews is stronger than the effect of the positive reviews.

This was particularly interesting to me since it differs from the traditionally perceived effect of print reviews, where both positive and negative reviews are thought to boost sales. But it just shows the differences in the model when you're looking at a single entity that combines both reviews and sales.

When customers can see the review at the point of purchase, it obviously has a different effect than if they read it in a newspaper, for example, and then subsequently see the book in a store or online. In the latter case, the negative effects of a pan might be more ameliorated, and the book might actually benefit from the increased level of recognition and attention.

If scientists had access to more hard data we could get an even better understanding about the effects of reviews on book sales. (One of the fundamental challenges of publishing is that the publishers don't have the data and economic analysis to support many of their practices.) But this is interesting to see in the meantime.

On Book Reviewing, Part 1

A year or so back, someone wrote to me with a series of questions for an article they were writing about book reviewing. I’ll confess, I don’t remember who the person was or what they were writing the piece for. (For some reason, I think maybe it was an academic thing.) I did, however, save the questions, and my responses to them. Here are the first two, for your reading pleasure.

Question 1: If someone wants to be a book reviewer, where do they start?

The first step is to read as many books as possible. I think it’s advisable to focus on a particular area or genre of books (e.g., mysteries, science fiction, American History). If you try to read and review books from across the spectrum, your chances of becoming sufficiently proficient in any one area are very small. There are just too many books published and too much going on in the different genres.

After you begin to read books in your area, you need to start thinking about them critically and analytically. You should ask yourself questions along the way: What works in this book and what doesn’t? What parts do I like and what parts do I not? Are the characters believable and well developed? Is the plot familiar or original? Does it strain the suspension of belief too far? Is the pacing consistent or does it drag? Does the author tell or does s/he show? (There are a million others.)

The key is to be able to determine what the book’s strengths and weaknesses are, both in terms of the story and the craft, and then be able to explain them in such a way that is intelligible to someone who hasn’t read the book.

Once you can do that, you’re ready to write a review. It’s important to note that writing the review is the more perfunctory part of the task. It’s the thought behind it that’s most important. We're assuming here that any potential reviewer has at least adequate writing skills. Therefore, this is the factor that separates a good reviewer from a mediocre one.

Question 2: How do you write a book review?

I believe that the purpose of a book review is to give the reader a sense of what the book is about, and to offer a reasoned opinion as to its relative merits and demerits. A review should help guide the reader into deciding whether or not the book in question is one that they would like to read themselves. Ideally, it will also give the reader some things to think about with regards to the book.

A review should provide a concise summary of the book’s plot, characters and themes, being careful not to reveal too much. A skillful review will usually incorporate analysis into the presentation of the summary, thus accomplishing two things at once.

The balance of a review should be composed of analysis of the book, including what was good about it and what was not, what worked and what did not. A good review will often place the book in some context, whether in terms of literature as a whole, the book’s genre or the author’s career.

Although there are some exceptions, any review that is an unqualified rave or a merciless pan should probably be reconsidered. Remember, balance and perspective are crucial. Above all, reviews should be fair, reasoned and give justification for their positions.

Too often the things I see masquerading as book reviews are really just book reports, the kind of things we used to write in high school. They’re long summaries of the story finished off with a very brief critique that usually reads something like “I thought this book was really good because…” That’s fine for what it is, but it’s not a book review.

To be continued...

Can you trust book reviews?

Dwight Garner, Salon's book editor, had an excellent piece recently in that publication called "Crisis in Critville: Why you can't trust book reviews." The focus of his piece is on literary critics, but there is some of it that is also applicable to us over here in the genre ghetto.

Garner begins by quoting George Orwell's wonderful essay, "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," a favorite of mine:

In a tart and clear-eyed essay he titled "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," George Orwell once wrote that it is "almost impossible to mention books in bulk without grossly overpraising the great majority of them." And he added, perhaps unnecessarily: "Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are."

Garner then examines Orwell's thesis and the state of book reviewing today with a series of questions and answers. A couple of his points particularly struck me, so I thought I'd share them, along with my reactions.

Q. If Orwell's thesis about critics "grossly overpraising" books is still true, how can I test it?

A. The next time you bump into a book critic at a party, ask what he or she has read in the past six months that's really blown their hair back, that they've really admired. Chances are they'll be stumped -- at least long enough for you to refill your drink -- even if they've written a heap of glowing reviews during that time...I propose a new rule: Critics may only praise books they're willing to force their friends to read.

This is painfully true, I'm sorry to say. When you review a lot of books, as I do, you too often find yourself writing things that, in retrospect at least, are exaggerated. I don't think it's deliberate. (It's not deliberate on my part, anyway.) But it can be easy to get carried away when you're writing a review, especially if you're doing so on deadline and are pressed for time. Often, I think it's necessary to let a book sit for a while before you can write about it with the requisite dispassion. Unfortunately, that's not always possible.

Garner attributes this overpraise to a pair of factors: literary grade inflation ("Critics read so much gray, mealy, well-intentioned schlock that anyone who is halfway readable...begins to seem like a Writer for the Ages.") and laziness ("It's far easier to write a positive review than a negative one.").

I think that the latter may come in to play infrequently, but the former is really what does it for me. So many of the books I see are so bad that when I find something that is at least reasonably good, I sometimes get carried away. I try to be cognizant of this and ward it off, but it still happens on occasion.

There have been times that I've looked back at reviews I've written and thought to myself, "Did I really write that? About that book?" And there have also been times when I had the opposite reaction, when I realize that I minimized a book that I subsequently realized was better than I gave it credit for. Needless to say, this is an imprecise business.

The good news is that neither of these happens to me very often. I probably am too generous at times with some of the books I write about, but for the most part I think I'm fair and honest in my reactions, and that I justify what I write. That is what I always strive for.

Q. Can I trust book blurbs?

A. Are you kidding? One true story, among many: This writer once reviewed a moderately bad novel titled "No Regrets," by a woman named Fern Kupfer, for a national magazine. (Okay, it was the Village Voice.) I referred to Kupfer's novel, in what I then thought of as a nifty stab, as "the best example yet of what can only be called Vintage Contemporary Lite." (This was in the late '80s, when Vintage Contemporaries were in vogue.) When the paperback came out, I was blurbed thusly: "The best example yet of what can only be called vintage contemporary life." Small "v", small "c", no "Lite." Talk about Orwellian. Ask your local book critic for his or her horror stories.

Here's my story. The book in question was James Patterson's The Big Bad Wolf, which I reviewed for the Chicago Sun-Times. I wrote:

"James Patterson has mastered the art (if you can call it that) of writing mindless, page-turning best sellers that sell millions of copies, then disappear as quickly as last night's fast-food meal."

You can probably see where this one is going. Here is the blurb as it wound up in the paperback edition:

"James Patterson has mastered the art...of writing...page-turning best sellers."

I don't have a copy on-hand, but I'm pretty sure they did leave in the ellipses. (It would be dishonest to omit them.) I think that's the only time that a review of my has edited to the extent that it significantly changed the meaning of what I wrote.

Hyperion did truncate my review of J.A. Konrath's Whiskey Sour, but it wasn't as egregious. Writing for the Sun-Times, I said it was "the best debut of the year so far." It ended up on the cover of the paperback as "the best debut of the year." I didn't really have a problem with that, though, because the book was among my picks for the best debut and was as close to "the best" as any of them.

Q. Do critics try to get blurbed?

A. Only those who are aspiring to be Joel Siegel or, on a somewhat loftier plane, Michiko Kakutani. But here's a game you can play: The next time you're in a bookstore in a major city, preferably New York, scan for the book critics hovering by the "new paperbacks" table. (Critics look just about how you'd expect them to look -- a little pale, a little paunchy, a little ink-stained wretchy.) No, they're not buying books. They get those for free. They're checking to see if their reviews are blurbed on the backs of new arrivals. If they are blurbed, critics worry they're becoming Gene Siskel. If they aren't, critics worry they're not on the map.

The part about the critics huddled near the new releases section of the bookstore searching for their blurbs made me laugh out loud. It's so true! The first thing I do every time I visit a bookstore is make my way for the paperbacks and start scanning the covers.

I get blurbed a lot, so more often than not I find a new one. I'll admit, it's a nice little ego stroke. (Granted, the blurbs never have my name on them. They're always attributed to "Chicago Sun-Times" or "Boston Globe" or whatever. But I know they're me.)

I don't try to write blurbable reviews, but I am conscious of the fact that the kinds of phrases that get blurbed are also likely to be the kinds of things that readers want to know. If a book is a "fast-paced debut" or a "crackling new thriller," that is information readers are looking for.

Phrases like that function as a kind of shorthand, and though they may be a little on the trite side, they're unavoidable. When I'm reviewing 5 books in an 800-word column, I don't have a lot of time to beat around the bush.

I do try to avoid clichés in my reviews whenever possible ("This book will keep you up all night!"), but I also try to write in punchy, active sentences, because that's what my readers are looking for. In the end, that probably makes me more blurbable than some people, but it's by accident, not design.

The thing I always recommend to readers when it comes to book reviews is to spend a little time reading various critics until you find a person (or persons) who writes fairly frequently, seems to be someone you can trust, and has taste that's similar to yours. If you can find someone like that, then their reviews can really be valuable to you. Just blindly picking up a review, though, without knowing anything about the critic isn't nearly as useful.

Oh, and one more thing. If I praise a book in print, you can rest assured that I'm willing to force my friends to read it.

Hmmm...you think maybe that's why nobody will accept my dinner invitations?

How to solicit reviews

I like it when people write to suggest books to me. I consider the recommendations I receive to be an important part of my tracking system. Given the outrageous number of books published every month, it's not only impossible for anyone to read but a fraction of them, it's nearly impossible just keeping up with what's available.

Case in point: Walter Mosley, one of my favorite authors, had a book (Cinnamon Kiss) released last month. This is something I'd be very interested in knowing. I read just about everything Mosley writes and would be likely to review it. (As it turned out, it would have been featured in my Chicago Sun-Times column, except the paper had already assigned it to someone else.) Despite my interest, I didn't even know the book was being published until it was on the shelves.

So recommendations can be very valuable to me. They're especially valuable when they come from people I know. But even if I don't, I still welcome the information. That's one of the reasons I recommend authors get to know who the various reviewers are and make sure those people know when you have a book coming out.

It's important to keep in mind the nature of your approach, though. Recently I received an email requesting that I review a book. Here is the message, in its entirety (only the embarrassing details, such as the book's title and the author's name, have been changed):

Please review Book X by Author Y, published by authorHouse.

Please email authory@aol.com to interview Author Y.

Can you imagine a less helpful email or a more useless review solicitation? And does it come as a surprise to anyone that AuthorHouse is a vanity publisher?

Such a message will, obviously, be ignored -- or else it will wind up being the object of a teaching lesson on someone's blog. You decide which is worse. What it won't do is get a review. There's no chance in hell of that.

Rather than just point out how silly this approach is, though, instead I'll use it as an opportunity to discuss what authors and publicists should do when soliciting reviews.

1. Include the relevant information.

The email should contain all the necessary information to help me decide if the book is something I might be interested in. This includes: the author's name, the book's title, the publisher, the publication date, a brief synopsis of the plot, and (briefly) anything else I need to know. (For example: it's the 3rd book in the series; the author was just nominated for an Edgar, etc.)

2. Be personal.

I tend to be underwhelmed by emails addressed to "Dear Editor." If you don't even know who I am, why do you want a review from me? It's not very hard to discover my name and who I am, so if someone doesn't even take the time to do that, I'm skeptical of how conscientious they are about other aspects of their work.

Your email doesn't have to be chatty. It doesn't even have to be complimentary. But it should demonstrate that you've done your homework and aren't just emailing every reviewer you come across. If you know who I am, or if we met once, or if you're familiar with my work, or you have similar taste in books, it couldn't hurt to reveal that. (Don't say it, though, if it's not true. My bullshit detector is state-of-the-art.)

3. Keep it brief.

The email should be as brief as possible and still include the necessary information. It should not include the information as an attachment, nor should it direct me to a website to get this information.

4. Don't include blurbs from other reviews.

A lot of publicists do this and I find it annoying. I don't care what other people thought of the book; I only care what I think of it. I'm not looking to jump on the bandwagon and review a book just because Kirkus loved it. If anything, I'm going to see that the book has already gotten several reviews and doesn't need my help.

5. Send the book right away.

If I say yes, you should be prepared to send the book promptly (or have a copy sent by the publisher). If the book isn't currently available, then hold off on contacting me until it is. If you're having the book sent by the publisher, make sure they send it. Pester them if necessary. (You wouldn't think this would be necessary, but sometimes it is.)

6. Don't pester me.

If you want, you can check with me after a week or two to see if I got the book. If I say yes, your work is done. If I say no, try to fix the problem right away. Once I get the book, though, that's it.

Don't follow-up to see if I've read it, or if I'm going to review it, or if I liked it, or anything else. Once you get the book in my hands, you've done your part.

7. Tell me if the book is self-published or from a vanity press.

Most newspapers will not run reviews of self-published or vanity press books, so this is information I need to know. Some self-published authors try to hide the true nature of their book in an effort to mislead reviewers. I don't recommend this. Be honest and straightforward about your work and let the chips fall where they may.

8. In sum: Be polite, be brief, be helpful, be honest.

After that, let it lie. If it works out, great. If not, you took your best shot.

Aspiring authors beware

Earlier this year, Xerox and Lulu.com (a Print-On-Demand company) sponsored an "Aspiring Authors Contest" to find "the best work of unpublished fiction" from an author willing to publish their book POD. Their goal was "to demonstrate the power of digital print-on-demand as a smart alternative to traditional book publishing."

First prize was 250 copies of the book and $5000. The judges were a well-respected pair: Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio and Emily Chenoweth of Publishers Weekly.

The winner was Tenure Track to Mommyville by Barbara Grosh, the story of an academic who is denied tenure and returns home to care for her child and try to save her marriage.

The purpose behind this contest was to legitimize the self-publishing or vanity/POD "alternative" for writers unable to break-in via the traditional route. If the sponsors could come up with a great book, one of the alleged many that languish unpublished due to the elitism and ignorance of New York publishers, surely this would be a triumph for aspiring vanity authors everywhere.

So let's see how they did.

Frank Wilson, my editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, is more open to self-published books than most review editors. (He's one of the few I know who'll even consider then.) He decided that Tenure Track to Mommyville might be an interesting book to include in the newspaper. So he gave it to Tanya Barrientos, one of the Inquirer's writers and a novelist herself, to review.

We often hear that the only thing self-published and POD books need is a chance. Given that, they'll be able to prove that they're just as good as the commercial books coming out of New York. So this one got a chance. Great news for all the self-published and vanity press authors out there, right?

Well...not so fast. Unfortunately, it turns out that the book wasn't very good. In Barrientos' judgment, it was not worth reviewing. She reports that:

In the publicity material, Corrigan is quoted as calling the novel "a picture of the trials and tribulations of 21st century motherhood."

But a well-crafted picture it's not. The story is serviceable, as is the prose. But there was nothing about Mommyville that made me think the self-publishing world is bubbling with undiscovered gold.

(Barrientos has some other things to say, too, so make sure to check out her comments.)

Wilson accepted her assessment and the book will not be reviewed in the Inquirer. So much for the POD alternative. If even their contest winner isn't up to snuff, how bad must the rest of them be?

(For more thoughts on things writers should be wary of, including vanity presses, check out J.A. Konrath's excellent piece "Writing Scams" over on his blog.)