Any outside confirmation can be better than none.
When I was a player on a stage, Saturdays were often electric days. Reviewers would attend our Friday night opening. Their notices usually appeared in the next day’s newspaper. These were professionals help audiences find their way to a seat at a good show. That is essentially how review services work today for books. The only difference is that now the reviewers are often paid by the creators of the works.. Our fees to Kirkus or Clarion or Midwest Book Review ensure that our books will get consideration by a reviewer. That’s what happened this week for my novel Sins of Liberty.
You might guess that the book’s review was a good one, or I wouldn’t be bringing it up. To my surprise, the doubts I had about my book didn’t show up outside my critical artist’s head. Calling historical fiction “an addictive melodrama” was a pleasant win. Yes, the review found some quibbles with a sentence in the uncorrected, pre-publication edition I had to submit. History can be dry, and something addictive seems like it’s on the way to juicy.
If along the way you hear your book’s overwrought in places, you hope that the reviewer is adept enough to measure your story’s tragedy and call it a soupçon’s worth, a word that means “just a dollop.” Somebody with literary chops wrote that, a reviewer who could be stingy with praise. I’ve seen it happen from Kirkus, and other reviewing services. Everybody is kinder, a gentility that doesn’t help a reader all the time. It’s hard to find a Kirkus review that’s bereft of anything to use in your promotion. They are fussy, though.
Outside eyes help us
I’m the sort of creator who thrives on outside confirmation. That means that while the book is under construction, its merits submerge while its flaws stand out in my eye. The Harry Chapin song “Mr. Tanner” talks of a dry cleaner who loved to sing and mounted a concert. “He did not know how well he sang, he only heard the flaws” is followed by “he did not know how well he sang, it just made him whole.” I can say that writing and submitting Sins of Liberty has helped make me whole.
I was prepared for something more critical about those flaws. My proofing, like all proofreading, includes late-stage light copyedits still making their way to the final pages. What matters the most, by the looks of the Kirkus review, is the strength of the story and the soul of the characters. Those are the elements that I focus on for authors. You can craft a spectacular sentence or a moving description, but earning an “intriguing” or a “poignant” in your review comes from the heart of the book.
Kirkus charged well for its rush-delivery of my review, but $600 got the coverage back to me in five weeks, time enough to get an excerpt of that notice into an ad that’s going out to 7,500 booksellers. There are no guarantees in publishing about anything, except this: missing a deadline for placing an ad is a capital crime, if you expect that ad to help the book find space on bookstore shelves.
Should you buy review confidence?
It’s common to hear from authors that paying for a review doesn’t count, or that the cost is higher than their book deserves. These authors don’t put it that way when they account for their budgets and reviews. They just say things like “it gives me pause,” or they doubt they’ll make back the expense. Promotion is the kind of budget item that includes spending that you won’t recover. They say that half of what we spend to promote our books won’t help them, but we don’t know which half. Authors with traditional contracts say that the promotion usually falls into the author’s budget, in both time and in expense. That’s today’s publishing reality.
In the meantime, I’m buoyant about addictive and intriguing. You only get one first review of a book, and I hope for my authors that their fortune is good enough to lift their confidence. I got a text that my review was ready, just as I was heading into the gym. I rode the stationary cycle hard and imagined the best. Submit your work. The burn you feel from it fades when you review surfaces.
