I ran this--with permission of course--in my
Sharingwithwriters newsletter and received more thank yous from grateful indie authors for doing it than most anything else I have run. So thought I'd share it with my blog subscribers and visitors, too.
Midwest Book Review Assures Review for
Deserving Books
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This good
news from Jim Cox at Midwest Book Reviews is reprinted from the Midwest
Newsletter with permission.
By Jim Cox
It's a new year and I've developed a new policy here at the
Midwest Book Review that went into effect on January 1st. It all started a few
weeks ago when I was doing some office work and received five phone calls
during the morning from five self-published authors wanting a status report on
the books they had submitted for review.
In each case I had the unfortunate responsibility of informing
them that although their books had arrived safely and passed our initial
screening process, they were unable to achieve a review assignment in the
allotted time (14 to 16 weeks) simply because we had too many books being
submitted for review consideration (an average of 2000 a month) and only 81
reviewers.
Then with the fifth of those phone calls I got a sudden
inspiration. So here's the new policy based on that idea:
Any author or publisher who has submitted a book for review
consideration to the Midwest Book Review and whose book passed our initial
screening and simply did not get reviewed because of "too many books, not
enough reviewers", that author or publisher can submit the MBR a review
from any other reviewer or review resource, as long as they have that
reviewer's permission to do so. We will run the review in our monthly book
review publication "Reviewer's Bookwatch" on behalf of that author or
publisher, under that reviewer's byline. (Of course, the reviewer retains all
copyright and ownership rights to their review, just like any other contributor
to the "Reviewer's Bookwatch".)
I'm making this policy retroactive, so if you have ever submitted
a book to the Midwest Book Review in the past and it failed to achieve a review
assignment from us, then this offer is open to you.
Here is a link to our "Reviewer Guidelines" that I
provide anyone seeking to submit reviews to the Midwest Book Review -- feel
free to use it if you are recruiting your own reviewers:
So now our online book review 'audience' of booksellers and the
general reading public, including our network of libraries and librarians, is
open anyone whose book was good enough to pass our screening process but didn't
make it all the way through because of our limited reviewer resources.
This new policy is in service to our overall goal of promoting
literacy, libraries, and small press publishing.
All of the previous issues of the "Jim Cox Report" are
archived on the Midwest Book Review website. If you'd like to receive the
"Jim Cox Report" directly (and for free), just send me an email
asking to be signed up for it.
So until next time -- goodbye, good luck, and good reading!
-----
The New Book Review is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning
HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers. It is a free service offered to those who want to encourage the reading of books they love. That includes authors who want to share their favorite reviews, reviewers who'd like to see their reviews get more exposure, and readers who want to shout out praise of books they've read. Please see submission guidelines on the left of this page. Reviews and essays are indexed by genre, reviewer names, and review sites. Writers will find the search engine handy for gleaning the names of small publishers. Find other writer-related blogs at
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