Thoughts on a late-arriving review of my book

When my book came out last year, I tried to focus my marketing efforts on getting it reviewed. My graduate school adviser helped me navigate the process of finding someone to review it at American Book Review. ABR focuses on small-market books. In exchange, my adviser asked me to review a book for someone else. It took me a lot of effort to stop everything last year, read that book, and come up with something intelligent to say about it. I actually don't know if they're going to publish my review.

Apparently, there is a fairly lengthy lag between when ABR gets the reviews and when they publish them. Diane Goodman's review of my book just appeared in the January-April edition of ABR. (They usually put these out more often than quarterly. I have to imagine they're having issues at the journal.)

It's a really nice review, just like the other ones I've gotten. I think that ABR is mostly in libraries, so the majority of its readers are probably people who read the print version. If that's true, the people who might have read this review already saw it a while ago. ABR puts its digital versions out months behind the print versions, which is why I just now saw it.

Here's what I've learned about reviews from smaller venues: they're really nice, and they make you feel good, but they don't sell books. This review from ABR has been out for a while, and in that time, my book has sold two copies on Amazon. Marketing books is a social media game. I was talking to someone this week who was describing how Twitch, the video-streaming site that focuses on video game play, works for people trying to gain sponsorship. It sounded a lot like how we are encouraged at writers' conferences to market our books: Twitter stalk anyone who matters, make friends, hope they cross-reference you. My reviews would only really have helped me if I had posted a link to it on Twitter and had an army of people to re-tweet it. That sounds awful. I like to write words in silence, not chat up my friends while drunk-playing Overwatch. Do I really have to market myself the same way?

I don't think I'm cut out for the modern world of self-promotion. I tried looking around for a new job the other day, just to see if anything might be out there. Job hunting sites all push LinkedIn now, and there is some algorithm-driven science to not only how you write a resume, but how you create your LinkedIn profile. I gave up. In any event, an awful lot of the jobs for people like me, whose main skill is writing, seem to be in creating social media content for companies. I don't like tweeting to pimp my own work, so I doubt I'd enjoy tweeting or doing whatever a post on Pinterest is called for someone else.

For now, that was a nice surprise to find that review had finally come out. In all likelihood, it's the last one I'll get for this book, and the last time anyone will ever talk about the stories in it. It's nice, at a time when I have a ton of other work I've done--work I think it better than Don't Wait to Be Called but that I can't seem to get published--to look back on the book and realize that I managed to have a little bit of success there when I didn't even know what I was doing. Maybe I'll get lucky again.