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.

Washington Independent Review of Books reviews my collection of short stories

Let my friend Chris know that I actually did manage to do one thing right as a self-promoter of my book: I got a review from Washington Independent Review of Books.

I didn't know for sure that they were going to review it. (In fact, it's been up for three days and I just now saw it.) I sent them two books, because the folks at my publisher, Washington Writers' Publishing House, suggested it. A woman on the WWPH staff knew someone at WIRB, but when I sent them the books to review, I forgot to include my email address, because I am a moron. So I never heard from them. I also saw on Amazon that there was a used copy of my book for sale at the Goodwill right by the WIRB, so I wondered if they just dumped it. But it looks like they did a real service to a local writer and used one copy to get it reviewed.

They don't normally review a whole lot of books from small presses like mine. I believe this was a solid they did me because I'm local. That's darn nice of them.

It's especially gratifying to see this now, because I'm in the middle of doing my own literary good citizenship right now. I'm doing a review of a book someone asked me to do. Turns out, it's a much harder assignment than I thought it would be. The American Review of Books actually wants a short academic paper. I haven't written anything like that in years. I'm not sure I'm up for it, but it's my job to do this, and I know if I were the author, I'd want me to put some effort into it. So I'm struggling through it. Nice to see karma paying me back for it ahead of time.

Why I'm not using a Kirkus Review for my book

I kind of got a magical shortcut to a first book by winning a contest. I guess it's as good a way to get a book published as any. The nice folks at Washington Writers' Publishing House put together a pretty nice package for me:

-$1000
-They pay for the printing of the book
-They publicize it on their website and social media
-They got me a couple of readings for the fall at D.C. bookstores

However, there are a lot of ways in which I'm kind of on my own. Not totally on my own: they'll give me advice. But there are some steps related to publicity that are my responsibility:

-Contact venues for reviews
-Set up my own readings outside the ones they set up
-Get papers to publish announcements (papers? honest to god newspapers? who would read the announcement?)
-Generally promote myself

One of the suggestions they made was to get a Kirkus review. What's Kirkus? They used to be the book reviewer. From what I can gather, they kind of went belly up in 2009, but then re-emerged by selling their services to authors. They seem to especially market themselves to the self-published, suggesting a Kirkus review will make the book look more legitimate. It's $425 to get a review in seven to nine weeks. That review then shows up on Amazon and...other places? I'm a little hazy on this. Basically, it will increase the visibility of my book, I guess.

Okay, fine, but it's $425. That's on me to pay. No wonder the head of the publishing house said, when she told me I had won, "You're not going to make any money off this." They were expecting that $1000 would go to stuff like this, I'd guess.

Here's the thing. I kind of already told WWPH that I would donate the $1000 back to them. (I hasten to add that I did this on my own. They are allowed to advertise their contest in certain places because they offer a prize, and they didn't at all ask for the money back. I just was really impressed with this small, cooperative publishing house, and this was something I wanted to do. Everyone who wins is then supposed to help out the publishing house for a while. This is my way of helping. I don't have a lot of other talents. It's unlikely I'll be able to do much else for them of any value. )

The upshot is that $425 is a lot of money to me. Mrs. Heretic and I have had a kind of crappy run of luck money-wise, with unexpected bills popping up here and there this last year. That's a lot of money to me. (I apologize to my anonymous reader, who dislikes when I complain about money problems.)  Kirkus can't really promise that the money spent is going to result in a lot of sales. Or any extra sales, really. The last several winners of this contest said they used Kirkus. So far, only one winner has sold at least 1,000 copies of her book, and that was because it got picked up for D.C. schools, who bought a few thousand copies.

My former advisor from graduate school--with whom I had a nice conversation, including a post-mortem of what went wrong in graduate school--has promised to get the book reviewed on American Book Review. Another member of the publishing house will help get it reviewed at the Washington Independent Review of Books. I think I'm going to just call that enough. The book is just not going to sell that many copies. Most of the people who buy it are likely to be people who know me. I don't know that many people.

Another issue is that the review Kirkus gives you, about 300 words, is typically about 200 words of plot review. I have a book of 12 short stories that don't go together at all. Fuck they gonna say bout that? Nothing that will convince people to buy the book. 

In other words, I don't know really what I'm going to get for my money. I'm okay with the fact that this book isn't going to sell a lot. There's no way, though, that I'm going to pay what would be the first $425 of my son's college fund on some vanity project for myself.

Blurb blahs

I'm supposed to get people to write blurbs for the back of my book. You know the kind of thing: "Weber's trenchant insight into the human condition left me for days in a state of emotional priapism so intense, I had to call my doctor." I can't believe anyone buys a book based on the blurbs, unless maybe an author you really admire signs off on the work of another writer.

I don't know anybody in writing. I've asked one person I remember from graduate school if he'd do it, and he agreed, but then in the same breath said he'd be unavailable until after the deadline. I asked some of the other editors at my literary journal, and none responded. It's probably a lot to ask of people who already volunteer to read a lot of literature for free. If I were a better self-marketer, I'd ask one of my advisors from grad school, who are reasonably big names, but I feel like it would be annoying to them to do, and they'd either say no or say yes unwillingly.

I can't bring myself to do the legwork to get someone to do these, not when I think it's such a borderline dishonest bit of advertising anyway. Has anyone ever put something like "Weber's bloated prose is equaled only by his pretentious syntax" on a book cover? Of course not. They're always positive, and so they're meaningless. Blurbs are always more inflated than a community college's grading system.

In the end, I'll probably keep bugging people from the magazine until somebody caves. I'll get this done, but it's another indicator to me that if being a writer involves a lot of energetic self-promotion, I'm not cut out for it.