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The Sicilian Inheritance

Sara Marsala is going through a rough patch, to say the least. In the process of divorcing from her husband and battling for custody of her four-year-old daughter, being forced to close her restaurant...

Beyond the Book

A Brief History of Sicily

We may think of Sicily today as merely an extension of the Italian mainland, but the island has its own unique history that dates back thousands of years and reflects the cultural, political, and ...

The Light Eaters

The human race is completely dependent on plants. Many people, however, give little thought to plants' importance, often seeing them as closer to inanimate objects than fellow living things. ...

Boquila trifoliolata , the "Chameleon Vine"

Zoe Schlanger's popular science book The Light Eaters goes in-depth on several remarkable plants, one of which is the climbing vine Boquila trifoliolata. This woody vine, found in the temperate ...

Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves

As a recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Grant, and a Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University, author J. Drew Lanham would be undoubtedly qualified to explore man's ...

Books Exploring Our Relationship with Birds

Throughout his collection of poems Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves, J. Drew Lanham explores the restorative effect of immersing himself in nature. His particular passion, however, is birds. ...

Glorious Exploits

Lampo and Gelon are two unemployed potters in their thirties whose lives are spent between their usual tavern in Syracuse and the quarries where Athenian soldiers defeated in the Peloponnesian War ...

Irish Vernacular in Glorious Exploits

While it's impossible to determine for sure how ancient Greeks sounded, Ferdia Lennon asserts that, despite what one hears and reads in many works depicting this era, they didn't echo the tones of ...

Song of the Six Realms

Xue'er has no place in the kingdom of Qi or any of the Six Realms. Her name means "Solitary Snow" and it surely fits a girl doomed to life as an "undesirable." Orphaned when she was young, all Xue has...

Music and poetry are a central part of Song of the Six Realms by Judy I. Lin. They are cornerstones of life in the kingdom of Qi and the Celestial world beyond it. Music may entertain but it also ...

The Demon of Unrest

In the aftermath of the 1860 presidential election, the divided United States began to collapse as South Carolina seceded from the Union, followed by another six Southern states. Among the countless ...

Fort Sumter Today

As Erik Larson recounts in The Demon of Unrest, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired on Fort Sumter, off the coast of South Carolina, at 4:30 a.m. on April 12th, 1861. Thirty-six hours...

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Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. Chung

Eve J. Chung's debut novel recounts a family's flight to Taiwan during China's Communist revolution.

The Stolen Child by Ann Hood

An unlikely duo ventures through France and Italy to solve the mystery of a child’s fate.

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Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld A comedy writer's stance on love shifts when a pop star challenges her assumptions in this witty and touching novel.

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'The Last Murder at the End of the World' is a story of survival and memory

May 24, 2024 • Stuart Turton’s bizarre whodunit also works as a science fiction allegory full of mystery that contemplates the end of the world and what it means to be human.

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'Rednecks' chronicles the largest labor uprising in American history

May 23, 2024 • Taylor Brown's Rednecks is a superb historical drama full of violence and larger-than-life characters that chronicles the events of leading to the Battle of Blair Mountain.

What's it like to live in a vacation spot when tourists leave? 'Wait' offers a window

May 22, 2024 • Set during a uniquely stressful summer for one Nantucket family, Gabriella Burnham's second novel highlights the strong bonds between a mom and her daughters.

Prize-winning Bulgarian writer brings 'The Physics of Sorrow' to U.S. readers

May 21, 2024 • Writer Georgi Gospodinov won the 2023 International Booker Prize for his book Time Shelter. The Physics of Sorrow , an earlier novel, now has an English translation by Angela Rodel.

Books We Love

20 new books hitting shelves this summer that our critics can't wait to read.

May 21, 2024 • We asked our book critics what titles they are most looking forward to this summer. Their picks range from memoirs to sci-fi and fantasy to translations, love stories and everything in between.

'Whale Fall' centers the push-and-pull between dreams and responsibilities

May 16, 2024 • Elizabeth O'Connor's spare and bracing debut novel provides a stark reckoning with what it means to be seen from the outside, both as a person and as a people.

Two new novels investigate what makes magic, what is real and imagined

May 15, 2024 • Both of these novels, Pages of Mourning and The Cemetery of Untold Stories, from an emerging writer and a long-celebrated one, respectively, walk an open road of remembering love, grief, and fate.

What are 'the kids' thinking these days? Honor Levy aims to tell in 'My First Book'

May 14, 2024 • Social media discourse and the inevitable backlash aside, the 26-year-old writer's first book is an amusing, if uneven, take on growing up white, privileged, and Gen Z.

Claire Messud's sweeping novel borrows from her own 'Strange Eventful History'

May 13, 2024 • Messud draws from her grandfather's handwritten memoir as she tells a cosmopolitan, multigenerational story about a family forced to move from Algeria to Europe to South and North America.

My Octopus Teacher's Craig Foster dives into the ocean again in 'Amphibious Soul'

May 13, 2024 • Nature's healing power is an immensely personal focus for Foster. He made his film after being burned out from long, grinding hours at work. After the release of the film, he suffered from insomnia.

'Women and Children First' is a tale about how actions and choices affect others

May 11, 2024 • The puzzle of a girl's death propels Alina Grabowski's debut novel but, really, it's less about the mystery and more about how our actions impact each other, especially when we think we lack agency.

A 19th-century bookbinder struggles with race and identity in 'The Library Thief'

May 10, 2024 • In her debut novel taking place in the Victorian era, Kuchenga Shenjé explores the expectations that arise when society demands that every group be neatly categorized.

Magic, secrets, and urban legend: 3 new YA fantasy novels to read this spring

May 8, 2024 • A heist with a social conscience, a father using magic for questionable work, an urban legend turned sleepover dare: These new releases explore protagonists embracing the magic within themselves.

'Long Island' renders bare the universality of longing

May 7, 2024 • In a heartrending follow-up to his beloved 2009 novel, Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín handles uncertainties and moral conundrums with exquisite delicacy, zigzagging through time to a devastating climax.

A poet searches for answers about the short life of a writer in 'Traces of Enayat'

May 1, 2024 • Poet Iman Mersal's book is a memoir of her search for knowledge about the writer Enayat al-Zayyat; it's a slow, idiosyncratic journey through a layered, changing Cairo — and through her own mind.

'Real Americans' asks: What could we change about our lives?

April 30, 2024 • Many philosophical ideas get an airing in Rachel Khong's latest novel, including the existence of free will and the ethics of altering genomes to select for "favorable" inheritable traits.

As National Poetry Month comes to a close, 2 new retrospectives to savor

April 29, 2024 • April always brings some of the years' biggest poetry collections. So as it wraps up, we wanted to bring you two favorites — retrospective collections from Marie Howe and Jean Valentine.

A new collection of Emily Dickinson's letters has been published by Harvard's Belknap Press, edited by Dickinson scholars Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell. Three Lions/Getty Images hide caption

This collection may be the closest we'll ever come to a Dickinson autobiography

April 25, 2024 • The Letters of Emily Dickinson collects 1,304 letters, starting with one she wrote at age 11. Her singular voice comes into its own in the letters of the 1860s, which often blur into poems.

Looking for new ways to appreciate nature? 2 new birding books may help

April 22, 2024 • Novelist Amy Tan's The Backyard Bird Chronicles centers on an array of birds that visit her yard, as Trish O'Kane's Birding to Change the World recalls lessons from birds that galvanized her teaching.

'When I Think of You' could be a ripped-from-the-headlines Hollywood romance

April 18, 2024 • Myah Ariel's debut is like a fizzy, angsty mash-up of Bolu Babalola and Kennedy Ryan as the challenges of doing meaningful work in Hollywood threaten two young lovers' romantic reunion.

5 new mysteries and thrillers for your nightstand this spring

April 17, 2024 • These new books will take you from murder in present-day Texas to cryptography in Cold War Berlin to an online community that might hold the solution to a missing-person case.

It's a wild ride to get to the bottom of what everyone's hiding in 'A Better World'

April 16, 2024 • A very sinister thriller with a dash of science-fiction and full of inscrutabilities, Sarah Langan's novel is as entreating and creepy as it is timely and humane.

Pop Culture Happy Hour

Books we love: love and romance.

April 15, 2024 • NPR's Books We Love is a roundup of favorite books of the year, sorted and tagged to help you find exactly what you're looking for. From the meet cutes to the happy endings and through all the ups and downs in between, we're recommending great books for people who love love and romance.

In 'Like Happiness,' a woman struggles to define a past, destructive relationship

April 12, 2024 • Ursula Villarreal-Moura's debut novel movingly portrays its protagonist coming to terms with an imbalanced, difficult, and sometimes harmful friendship that was also a key part of her life for years.

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The 10 Best Book Reviews of 2020

Adam morgan picks parul sehgal on raven leilani, merve emre on lewis carroll, and more.

The pandemic and the birth of my second daughter prevented me from reading most of the books I wanted to in 2020. But I was able to read vicariously  through book critics, whose writing was a true source of comfort and escape for me this year. I’ve long told my students that criticism is literature—a genre of nonfiction that can and should be as insightful, experimental, and compelling as the art it grapples with—and the following critics have beautifully proven my point. The word “best” is always a misnomer, but these are my personal favorite book reviews of 2020.

Nate Marshall on Barack Obama’s A Promised Land ( Chicago Tribune )

A book review rarely leads to a segment on The 11th Hour with Brian Williams , but that’s what happened to Nate Marshall last month. I love how he combines a traditional review with a personal essay—a hybrid form that has become my favorite subgenre of criticism.

“The presidential memoir so often falls flat because it works against the strengths of the memoir form. Rather than take a slice of one’s life to lay bare and come to a revelation about the self or the world, the presidential memoir seeks to take the sum of a life to defend one’s actions. These sorts of memoirs are an attempt maybe not to rewrite history, but to situate history in the most rosy frame. It is by nature defensive and in this book, we see Obama’s primary defensive tool, his prodigious mind and proclivity toward over-considering every detail.”

Merve Emre on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ( The Point )

I’m a huge fan of writing about books that weren’t just published in the last 10 seconds. And speaking of that hybrid form above, Merve Emre is one of its finest practitioners. This piece made me laugh out loud and changed the way I think about Lewis Carroll.

“I lie awake at night and concentrate on Alice,  on why my children have fixated on this book at this particular moment. Part of it must be that I have told them it ‘takes place’ in Oxford, and now Oxford—or more specifically, the college whose grounds grow into our garden—marks the physical limits of their world. Now that we can no longer move about freely, no longer go to new places to see new things, we are trying to find ways to estrange the places and objects that are already familiar to us.”

Parul Sehgal on Raven Leilani’s Luster ( The New York Times Book Review )

Once again, Sehgal remains the best lede writer in the business. I challenge you to read the opening of any  Sehgal review and stop there.

“You may know of the hemline theory—the idea that skirt lengths fluctuate with the stock market, rising in boom times and growing longer in recessions. Perhaps publishing has a parallel; call it the blurb theory. The more strained our circumstances, the more manic the publicity machine, the more breathless and orotund the advance praise. Blurbers (and critics) speak with a reverent quiver of this moment, anointing every other book its guide, every second writer its essential voice.”

Constance Grady on Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ( Vox )

Restoring the legacies of ill-forgotten books is one of our duties as critics. Grady’s take on “the least famous sister in a family of celebrated geniuses” makes a good case for Wildfell Hall’ s place alongside Wuthering Heights  and Jane Eyre  in the Romantic canon.

“[T]he heart of this book is a portrait of a woman surviving and flourishing after abuse, and in that, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall feels unnervingly modern. It is fresh, shocking, and wholly new today, 200 years after the birth of its author.”

Ismail Muhammad on Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley ( The Atlantic )

Muhammad is a philosophical critic, so it’s always fun to see him tackle a book with big ideas. Here, he makes an enlightened connection between Wiener’s Silicon Valley memoir and Michael Lewis’s 1989 Wall Street exposé, Liar’s Poker.

“Like Lewis, Wiener found ‘a way out of unhappiness’ by writing her own gimlet-eyed generational portrait that doubles as a cautionary tale of systemic dysfunction. But if her chronicle acquires anything like the must-read status that Lewis’s antic tale of a Princeton art-history major’s stint at Salomon Brothers did, it will be for a different reason. For all her caustic insight and droll portraiture, Wiener is on an earnest quest likely to resonate with a public that has been sleepwalking through tech’s gradual reshaping of society.”

Hermione Hoby on Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs ( 4 Columns )

Hoby’s thousand-word review is a great example of a critic reading beyond the book to place it in context.

“When Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs  was first published in 2008, the then-governor of Tokyo, the ultraconservative Shintaro Ishihara, deemed the novel ‘unpleasant and intolerable.’ I wonder what he objected to? Perhaps he wasn’t into a scene in which the narrator, a struggling writer called Natsuko, pushes a few fingers into her vagina in a spirit of dejected exploration: ‘I . . . tried being rough and being gentle. Nothing worked.’”

Taylor Moore on C Pam Zhang’s How Much Of These Hills Is Gold ( The A.V. Club )

Describing Zhang’s wildly imaginative debut novel is hard, but Moore manages to convey the book’s shape and texture in less than 800 words, along with some critical analysis.

“Despite some characteristics endemic to Wild West narratives (buzzards circling prey, saloons filled with seedy strangers), the world of How Much Of These Hills Is Gold feels wholly original, and Zhang imbues its wide expanse with magical realism. According to local lore, tigers lurk in the shadows, despite having died out ‘decades ago’ with the buffalo. There also exists a profound sense of loss for an exploited land, ‘stripped of its gold, its rivers, its buffalo, its Indians, its tigers, its jackals, its birds and its green and its living.’”

Grace Ebert on Paul Christman’s Midwest Futures ( Chicago Review of Books )

I love how Ebert brings her lived experience as a Midwesterner into this review of Christman’s essay collection. (Disclosure: I founded the Chicago Review of Books five years ago, but handed over the keys in July 2019.)

“I have a deep and genuine love for Wisconsin, for rural supper clubs that always offer a choice between chicken soup or an iceberg lettuce salad, and for driving back, country roads that seemingly are endless. This love, though, is conflicting. How can I sing along to Waylon Jennings, Tanya Tucker, and Merle Haggard knowing that my current political views are in complete opposition to the lyrics I croon with a twang in my voice?”

Michael Schaub on Bryan Washington’s Memorial ( NPR )

How do you review a book you fall in love with? It’s one of the most challenging assignments a critic can tackle. But Schaub is a pro; he falls in love with a few books every year.

“Washington is an enormously gifted author, and his writing—spare, unadorned, but beautiful—reads like the work of a writer who’s been working for decades, not one who has yet to turn 30. Just like Lot, Memorial  is a quietly stunning book, a masterpiece that asks us to reflect on what we owe to the people who enter our lives.”

Mesha Maren on Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season ( Southern Review of Books )

Maren opens with an irresistible comparison between Melchor’s irreverent novel and medieval surrealist art. (Another Disclosure: I founded the Southern Review of Books in early 2020.)

“Have you ever wondered what internal monologue might accompany the characters in a Hieronymus Bosch painting? What are the couple copulating upside down in the middle of that pond thinking? Or the man with flowers sprouting from his ass? Or the poor fellow being killed by a fire-breathing creature which is itself impaled upon a knife? I would venture to guess that their voices would sound something like the writing of Mexican novelist Fernanda Melchor.”

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The 13 Best Book Review Sites and Book Rating Sites

Knowing where to buy books can be challenging. So, here are the best book review sites to help you avoid buying books that you'll regret reading.

Nobody likes to spend money on a new book only to face that overwhelming feeling of disappointment when it doesn't live up to your expectations. The solution is to check out a few book review sites before you hit the shops. The greater the diversity of opinions you can gather, the more confidence you can have that you'll enjoy the title.

Which book review and book rating sites are worth considering? Here are the best ones.

1. Goodreads

Goodreads is arguably the leading online community for book lovers. If you want some inspiration for which novel or biography to read next, this is the book review site to visit.

There's an endless number of user-generated reading lists to explore, and Goodreads itself publishes dozens of "best of" lists across a number of categories. You can do a book search by plot or subject , or join book discussions and reading groups with thousands of members.

You can participate in the community by adding your own rankings to books you've read and leaving reviews for other people to check out. Occasionally, there are even bonus events like question and answer sessions with authors.

2. LibraryThing

LibraryThing is the self-proclaimed largest book club in the world. It has more than 2.3 million members and is one of the best social networking platforms for book lovers .

With a free account, you can add up to 200 books to your library and share them with other users. But it's in the other areas where LibraryThing can claim to be one of the best book review sites.

Naturally, there are ratings, user reviews, and tags. But be sure to click on the Zeitgeist tab at the top of the page. It contains masses of information, including the top books by rating, by the number of reviews, by authors, and loads more.

3. Book Riot

Book Riot is a blog. It publishes listicles on dozens of different topics, many of which review the best books in a certain genre. To give you an idea, some recent articles include Keeping Hoping Alive: 11 Thrilling YA Survival Stories and The Best Historical Fiction Books You’ve Never Heard Of .

Of course, there's also plenty of non-reading list content. If you have a general affinity for literature, Book Riot is definitely worth adding to the list of websites you browse every day.

Bookish is a site that all members of book clubs should know about. It helps you prep for your next meeting with discussion guides, book quizzes, and book games. There are even food and drink suggestions, as well as playlist recommendations.

But the site is more than just book club meetings. It also offers lots of editorial content. That comes in the form of author interviews, opinion essays, book reviews and recommendations, reading challenges, and giveaways.

Be sure to look at the Must-Reads section of the site regularly to get the latest book reviews. Also, it goes without saying that the people behind Bookish are book lovers, too. To get a glimpse of what they’re reading, check out their Staff Reads articles.

5. Booklist

Booklist is a print magazine that also offers an online portal. Trusted experts from the American Library Association write all the book reviews.

You can see snippets of reviews for different books. However, to read them in full, you will need to subscribe. An annual plan for this book review site costs $184.95 per year.

6. Fantasy Book Review

Fantasy Book Review should be high on the list for anyone who is a fan of fantasy works. The book review site publishes reviews for both children's books and adults' books.

It has a section on the top fantasy books of all time and a continually updated list of must-read books for each year. You can also search through the recommended books by sub-genres such as Sword and Sorcery, Parallel Worlds, and Epic Fantasy.

7. LoveReading

LoveReading is one of the most popular book review sites in the UK, but American audiences will find it to be equally useful.

The site is divided into fiction and non-fiction works. In each area, it publishes weekly staff picks, books of the month, debuts of the month, ebooks of the month, audiobooks of the month, and the nationwide bestsellers. Each book on every list has a full review that you can read for free.

Make sure you also check out their Highlights tab to get book reviews for selected titles of the month. In Collections , you'll also find themed reading lists such as World War One Literature and Green Reads .

Kirkus has been involved in producing book reviews since the 1930s. This book review site looks at the week's bestselling books, and provides lengthy critiques for each one.

As you'd expect, you'll also find dozens of "best of" lists and individual book reviews across many categories and genres.

And while you're on the site, make sure you click on the Kirkus Prize section. You can look at all the past winners and finalists, complete with the accompanying reviews of their books.

Although Reddit is a social media site, you can use it to get book reviews of famous books, or almost any other book for that matter! Reddit has a Subreddit, r/books, that is dedicated to book reviews and reading lists.

The subreddit has weekly scheduled threads about a particular topic or genre. Anyone can then chip in with their opinions about which books are recommendable. Several new threads are published every day, with people discussing their latest discovery with an accompanying book rating or review.

You'll also discover a weekly recommendation thread. Recent threads have included subjects such as Favorite Books About Climate Science , Literature of Indigenous Peoples , and Books Set in the Desert . There’s also a weekly What are you Reading? discussion and frequent AMAs.

For more social media-like platforms, check out these must-have apps for book lovers .

10. YouTube

YouTube is not the type of place that immediately springs to mind when you think of the best book review sites online.

Nonetheless, there are several engaging YouTube channels that frequently offer opinions on books they've read. You’ll easily find book reviews of famous books here.

Some of the most notable book review YouTube channels include Better Than Food: Book Reviews , Little Book Owl , PolandBananasBooks , and Rincey Reads .

Amazon is probably one of your go-to site when you want to buy something. If you don’t mind used copies, it’s also one of the best websites to buy second-hand books .

Now, to get book reviews, just search and click on a title, then scroll down to see the ratings and what others who have bought the book are saying. It’s a quick way to have an overview of the book’s rating. If you spot the words Look Inside above the book cover, it means you get to preview the first few pages of the book, too!

Regardless of the praises or criticisms you have heard from other book review sites, reading a sample is the most direct way to help you gauge the content’s potential and see whether the author’s writing style suits your tastes.

12. StoryGraph

StoryGraph is another good book review site that's worth checking out. The book rating is determined by the site's large community of readers. Key in the title of a book you're interested in and click on it in StoryGraph's search results to have an overall view of its rating.

Each book review provides information on the moods and pacing of the story. It also indicates whether the tale is plot or character-driven, what readers feel about the extent of character development, how lovable the characters generally are, and the diversity of the cast.

13. London Review of Books

The London Review of Books is a magazine that covers a range of subjects such as culture, literature, and philosophy. Part of its content includes amazingly detailed book reviews. If you feel that most modern book reviews are too brief for your liking, the London Review of Books should suit you best.

You'll gain insight into the flow and themes of the story, as well as a more thorough picture of the events taking place in the book.

Read Book Reviews Before You Buy

The book review sites we've discussed will appeal to different types of readers. Some people will be more comfortable with the easy-to-interpret book rating systems; others will prefer extensive reviews written by experienced professionals.

Although it’s easy to be tempted by a gorgeous book cover, it’s always best to have a quick look at the book reviews before actually buying a copy. This way, you can save your money and spend it on the books that you’ll be proud to display on your shelves for a long time. And check out recommendations, as well, to help you find what's worth reading.

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Last updated on Feb 07, 2023

How to Get Book Reviews in 5 Steps (2024 Update)

Imagine the day of your book launch. You’re sitting in front of your computer, blissfully imagining all the five-star book reviews that will soon be yours. Yet the days pass... and the reviews don't come.

Needless to say, you'll want people to buy and read your book ASAP so they can leave you some good reviews. But you may see the Catch-22 here: in order to make your first sales, you’ll need to display positive book reviews. So how do you get the chicken before you’ve got the egg (or vice versa)?

Enter book bloggers , who are your new best friends! For this post, we asked our top Reedsy publicists to share their best tips on how to get book reviews from book bloggers — and we've condensed their advice into these five essential steps, plus a few bonus tips at the end.

You can also check out this Reedsy Live on how to get your first book reviews, with advice from author and book marketer Debbie Drum.

Those who prefer their tips in written form, let's dive right in with the very first step of the review acquisition process!

1. Identify your audience

A quick preliminary note: you want to start the review-gathering as early as possible. If you can, plan your book review campaign 4-6 months in advance of your publication date. Because if you want your reviews to be in place by then, you’ll need to give people time to actually write them!

Now, using the "5 W’s of Storytelling," let's talk about the first thing you should be asking yourself: who? Who will be reading your book, and who is best positioned to promote it to that audience? The following tips will help you answer these questions.

Build a questionnaire

Here are a few more specific queries to help you clarify your "who":

• Who reads in my genre?
• What magazines, websites, forums, or blogs do they frequent?
• Where might they find reviews of my book that will entice them to buy it?

Indeed, publicist Jessica Glenn recommends building a full-length questionnaire to identify your audience and where you might find them on the Web (or in real life!).

“Most, if not all, publicists and publishers send authors a very long questionnaire to fill out when they start their marketing plan ,” she says. “That's so we can dig into any useful piece of bio, community, or regional info to figure out who and why people will be interested in your book.”

Your questionnaire will direct you to your target audience and help you create a  proto-persona.  This is the "ideal reader" of your book, so to speak — a perfect blend of the traits you'd expect them to have. (For example, if you've written a YA paranormal romance novel, your proto-persona might be a 14-year-old girl who's obsessed with Twilight .) And whoever they are, you'll keep them in mind every time you make a marketing decision.

Think about comp titles

Another great way to get a handle on your target audience is to figure out your comparative titles — books that are a) similar to yours and b) share the same general readership. When pitching to book reviewers, these are the titles you'll use to sell your own  book . For instance, "My book is  Normal People meets The Incendiaries ."

According to Jessica, you should have at least 15 potential comp titles for your book, ideally a mix of bestsellers and well-reviewed indie titles. “Many first-time authors balk at this," says Jessica, "as they believe there is no true comp for their book — but dig deep and you'll find them!”

Comp titles are critical because they act as a compass, pointing you towards a ready-made audience that enjoys works in the same mold as yours. This is a huge help in determining your target readers, as well as which reviewers will cater to them. Speaking of which...

2. Find relevant book blogs

Now that you’ve got a strong sense of your audience, you're ready to find blogs that will provide the best exposure to that audience. We recommend starting with our directory of 200+ book review blogs , but feel free to do your own research as well!

As you dig into book review blogs, check on these two things first:

• Is the site active? Has the blogger published a post within the last month or so?
• Are they currently accepting queries? If they're closed at the moment, it could be months before your book gets a review — if at all.

And if you want to confirm your book marketing strategy when it comes to book review blogs, we recommend first taking this quick quiz below!

Which book review site is right for you?

Find out here! Takes one minute.

Once you've confirmed that a book review blog is both active and open to queries, think about whether it's right for your  book. Here are some important factors to consider:

• Genre . Don't waste your time on blogs that don't review books in your genre. "Be very mindful of a publication’s particular audience and target market when pitching for review. If their readership is science-fiction, do not pitch a commercial crime novel!” says publicist Hannah Cooper .
• Traffic . High-traffic book blogs might seem like your highest priorities, but this isn’t necessarily true. “Don't shy away from the smaller blogs,” says publicist Beverly Bambury . “They can sometimes foster a real sense of community and starting off small is just fine."
• Posting frequency.  Another consideration is how often the blogger in question actually publishes reviews. Too often, and your book will get lost in the shuffle; too seldom, and they're likely to lose readers. Try to strike a balance with about 1-2 reviews per week — no decent reviewer can turn them out faster than that, anyway!

Track down your comp titles' reviewers

Remember those comp titles you came up with earlier? You can use them not only to pitch your book, but also to find potential reviewers , as they will correspond perfectly with your genre and target audience.

“Once you have your 15-or-so comps, you can research where each book has been reviewed,” says Jessica. “With luck, you will find at least a couple of book reviews per title, which will give you many more outlets to investigate further.”

Now, as an author, you might be wondering: “How can I begin to find all the places where a given book was reviewed?” Don’t forget the power of Google! Try searching the following terms to find reviews for a given title:

• [Title] + book review
• [Title] + review
• [Title] + Q&A

And here's one last tip to give you a boost — sign up for a "Mention" account and/or set up Google alerts to get a notification every time these titles appear online.

Once you’re armed with a bundle of suitable book review blogs, you've arrived at the third (and perhaps most crucial) step in this process. This is, of course, creating the pitches you'll send to reviewers.

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3. Write pitches for them

Pitching a reviewer is pretty straightforward. All you have to do is a) keep it short, and and b) personalize it as much as possible. However, before we get to our publicists’ actionable tips on pitching, there’s one more thing that you absolutely HAVE to do. And that thing is...

Read the review policy!

Before you pitch any blog, make sure you read the blogger’s review policy. Some blogs will have a form to fill out; others might ask you to email them directly. Still others might not welcome any queries from self-published authors . Whatever they say, make sure that you follow it to a T.

“There are two main benefits to reading and following the review policies closely,” says Beverly. “First, you show the reviewer that you respect and appreciate them when you follow their instructions. This is important when asking someone to do you a favor.

"Second, you may find that even if the site is closed for review queries, it's open to publicity queries — where you might be able to place an excerpt or do a Q&A or occasional blog post. You'll never know if you don't take the time to read the review policy first.”

More tips for pitching reviewers

Now that you’re clear on what the blogger wants, you can start pitching them with confidence. Here are three more key tips for pitching book reviewers:

1. Never send out bulk pitches. "When you pitch each outlet individually, specifically write that you read their positive book review of your comp and what that comp title was,” says Jessica Glenn. Or if you didn't find them through a comp title, mention other  aspects of their blog and why you think they would be great to review your book!

2. Be concise and direct. “Include your title, publisher, date of release, and genre in the first paragraph,” notes Beverly Bambury. “Then you might want to include the cover copy or a brief description of the book. Finally, be direct and ask for what you want. If you want a review, ask for it! If you want an excerpt placed, ask for that.”

3. Appeal to their commercial side. “All reviewers want the opportunity to discover the next 'big thing’ — particularly with fiction — so make them feel as though they have the opportunity to get the word out first," says Hannah Cooper. Indeed, if you can convince a reviewer that you are doing them  a favor, you're practically guaranteed to get a review.

Basically, try to get reviewers to think, “Oh, if I enjoyed [comp title], I’ll enjoy this person's book too,” or “They've done the research to know that I’m a good fit for their book.” If you can do that, you’re already much closer than everyone else to obtaining high-quality book reviews !

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4. Send out your book

This is the step before the moment of truth (the review itself), so it's extremely important to get everything right. To ensure you're complying with each reviewer's guidelines, review their policy again before you send them your book. Some bloggers might prefer digital copies of manuscripts, while others might want a physical ARC — be prepared to accommodate.

Also, as you begin sending your book to various outlets, you should track your progress in a spreadsheet. Record which blogs you’ve submitted to so far, which blogs have responded, and which blogs you plan to submit to, so you don't accidentally double-submit or skip over anyone.

Formatting your book

Other than double-checking the review policy, the most important thing to do here is to format your book in a professional manner . After all, you want the presentation of your content to match the quality! Even though it shouldn't technically matter, reviewers will definitely judge your book by how it looks, inside and out.

The good news for self-formatters that you probably won't need to send physical proofs, and ebooks are much easier to format than hard copies. Digital copies also cost next-to-nothing to produce, so you can easily send multiple copies of your book out to different reviewers. You may want to check out apps like Instafreebie and Bookfunnel , which make it easy to generate individual ARC download links that you can send to the reviewers.

Pro tip : If you’re searching for a good book production tool, the Reedsy Book Editor can format and convert your manuscript into professional EPUB and print-ready files in a matter of seconds!

5. Follow up after a week

A week or more has passed since you queried a book blog, and so far… crickets. What do you do now? Why, follow up,  of course!

When it comes to this stage, keep calm and follow Hannah Hargrave’s advice: “Don't bother reviewers for an answer daily. I will usually chase again after a week has passed.

"If you receive a decline response, or no one responds to your third chase-up, assume this means they are not interested. Any further follow-ups, or aggressive requests as to why your work's not being reviewed, will not be viewed kindly. Above all, be polite and friendly at all times.”

That said, someone rejecting your book for review is a worst-case scenario. Best-case scenario, the blogger responds favorably and you’ve bagged yourself a review!

What comes next, you ask?

The reviewer will post their review of your book on their blog — and on Amazon, Goodreads, and any other platforms that they’ll name in their review policy. This is yet another reason why it's vital to read that policy carefully, so you know exactly where  the review will be seen.

If all goes well, the reviewer will publish a positive review that you can use to further promote your book. Maybe you'll even get a decent pull-quote for your book description ! Not to mention that if you ever write a sequel, you can almost certainly count on them for a follow-up review.

Pro-tip: Want to write a book description that sells? Download this free book description template to get a headstart. 

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Learn to write a book description that will make readers click “buy.”

But what if you don't get any bites from book bloggers, or — horror of horrors — one of them gives you a negative review? Fortunately, the next two sections should help you deal with each of these possible dilemmas.

Bonus ways to get book reviews

Though book bloggers are the most reliable and professional source of reviews for independent authors, you may want to try other avenues to maximize your chances! Here are three more ways to get book reviews  for your work, so you can bolster your Amazon profile and start making some serious sales.

1. Tell your followers about your book

Though Amazon prohibits reviews from close friends and family , you're free to tell your random social media followers about your book and hope they leave good reviews. It obviously helps if you have a large following on Twitter or Instagram, even more so if some of those followers are fellow authors who appreciate the significance of reviews.

That said, NEVER offer "review swaps" or any kind of promotional enticement for customers to leave reviews, as this would also be against Amazon's terms. Simply let your followers know you've got a book out and that you'd love for them to read it; the rest is in their hands. However, when it comes to reviews, any amount of awareness is better than none.

2. Submit to Reedsy Discovery

Finally, for a professional review option that's a bit less time-and-effort-consuming on your part, you can submit your book right here on Reedsy Discovery! The platform allows authors to share their books with readers who are right up their alley, plus get the chance to be reviewed by one of our Discovery writers. If they leave a good review, you'll be featured in our newsletter, which goes out to thousands of subscribers every week.

Sounds pretty sweet, right? And it only takes a few minutes to submit .

Is your book ready for Discovery?

Take our quiz to find out! Takes only 1 minute.

How to deal with negative reviews

Once your work is out there in the world, you can’t control other people’s reactions to it. “Remember, by submitting your book for review, you're accepting that some people might not enjoy it,” says Hannah Hargrave. “It can be very tough after you’ve spent months or years crafting your novel, only for some reviewer to tear it apart. But you need to be prepared."

In that vein, here are some final tips on how to deal with bad reviews:

1. Have someone else read them first . This might be your agent, your friend, or your mom — anyone you trust to pre-screen your reviews. They can inform you whether each negative review is a worthwhile (if humbling) read, or just too nasty to stomach.

2. Ignore unreasonably hateful reviews . Easier said than done, yes, but really try to tune out these people! For example, if they're clearly not your target audience, but insist on pretending like they are. Or people who pick apart your sentences word-by-word, just for the "fun" of it. There's no sense in agonizing over readers who are determined to hate you, so block them on every platform and refuse to read anything else they write.

3. Address valid criticisms . You're only human, and your book won't be perfect. If someone points this out in a constructive way , acknowledge it and do what you can to fix it. This may be as simple as editing a misleading blurb, or as complex as restructuring your entire series. But if you're the author we know you are, you'll be up to the task.

Every author's book is different, but the process for getting book reviews is reassuringly universal. To recap: identify your audience, find relevant blogs, pitch them, send out your book, and don't forget to follow up! On top of that, feel free to try alternative strategies, and remember not to take the bad reviews too personally.

Yes, marketing a book may be madness, but the process of getting reviews lends method to that madness. So go forth and get your reviews — you deserve them! 🙌

Special thanks to book publicists Jessica Glenn , Hannah Hargrave , Hannah Cooper , and Beverly Bambury for their input and suggestions throughout this article. If you have any more questions about how to get book reviews, let us know in the comments!

2 responses

Elena Smith says:

25/09/2018 – 22:33

Excellent Write up. I have thoroughly gone through the article and according to my personal observations you have done a great job writing this Article.Being associated with writing profession, I must mention that AcademicWritingPro are quite helpful nowadays.Furthermore, quality is also an important aspect.

Team Golfwell says:

11/12/2018 – 05:38

We do free book reviews if your book interests us. We are a group of retired people in New Zealand who play golf, read books, write books, and do free book reviews if we like your book. We write books too, so we like to see what other authors are currently doing and it is amazing to see what writers are creating. We try to post our reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes & Noble and our social media. See our book review page for more info > > https://www.teamgolfwell.com/free-book-reviews.html #bookreviews #kindlebookreviews #amazonbookreviews #indiebookreviews https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4ad92dde2f70456000bf5c44af3489ee638dae511be91f7b8cb1545acb388cdb.jpg

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The lasting impact of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.’

Steven Hyden’s “There Was Nothing You Could Do” explores the blockbuster album, which turns 40 next month.

There’s a reason “Bruce Springsteen” is still a viable Halloween costume in 2024, and that reason is “ Born in the U.S.A. ”

The blockbuster album, which turns 40 next month, capped a dozen-year ascent to superstardom that turned a critically adored, ambivalent-about-fame singer-songwriter into a pop icon on a scale inhabited only by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé today.

The Boss’s red-bandanna-and-sleeveless-flannel-shirt phase was only a blip within a performing career that has now spanned more than half a century. More than a dozen Springsteen albums have been packaged behind portraits of his invariably careworn mug; only “Born in the U.S.A.” came swaddled in an Annie Leibovitz close-up of the denim-clad Boss-terior. But it was this synthesizer-heavy era that made Springsteen a permanent celebrity beyond the sphere of music fandom — and made it possible for the 74-year-old to continue filling stadiums even now, despite how profoundly the America beyond them has changed.

The disappearance of that metaphorical breadbasket, wherein the workaholic Springsteen briefly became an unlikely figure of national consensus, is the subject of ride-or-die Springsteen fan Steven Hyden’s new book, “ There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and the End of the Heartland .” If the book can’t explain the slow fade of a country that at least seemed to want consensus — which, as Hyden observes, also confounds Springsteen’s podcast co-host Barack Obama — it is at least an astute and briskly written look at the circumstances and legacy of an album whose outsize popularity has made it paradoxically divisive among Tramps Like Us.

As Hyden points out in his preface, almost no serious Broooooce fan claims “Born in the U.S.A.” as their favorite. It was too contemporary-sounding, too accessible, representing the only time Springsteen directed his hopeful but essentially fatalistic worldview at fickle listeners who’d never sit still for the 43 relatively down-tempo minutes of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” or the bleary-eyed introspection of “Nebraska.”

The latter album was released in 1982 as the marathon “Born in the U.S.A.” recording sessions wore on like a Stanley Kubrick film shoot, and the two LPs are inextricably linked. (Musician and writer Warren Zanes’s 2023 book about the making of “Nebraska,” “ Deliver Me From Nowhere ,” is good, but Hyden’s is more broadly curious.) The song that would become “Born in the U.S.A.’s” title track, with its widely-misread-as-jingoistic chorus and cannonball drums, first appeared as an acoustic, percussion-free lament during the bedroom sessions that begot “Nebraska.” Like many “Born in the U.S.A.” outtakes, that somber version wouldn’t get an official release until the “Tracks” box set in 1998, near the end of a decade when Springsteen more or less embraced the notion that his time as a mainstream unit-shifter had passed. His solo acoustic tour behind his 1995 folk album, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” covered a greater span of time than the “Born in the U.S.A.” tour had, albeit in much cozier venues. Springsteen opened these shows by asking punters to keep quiet so they could hear the songs — hardly the behavior of an aging rocker worried about his market share.

Hyden came of age during Springsteen’s ’90s wilderness era, and he’s previously devoted books to Pearl Jam and Radiohead — bands that became huge during the decade when Springsteen’s influence was at a low ebb. But that perspective helps him to perceive the long arc of the Boss’s career. He opens the book by recalling his first exposure to “Born in the U.S.A.” as a tyke — a little-discussed but important constituency for multiplatinum albums in this era. As with the contemporaneous megasellers “Thriller” and “Purple Rain,” “Born in the U.S.A.’s” bright production and sheer ubiquity made it a powerful gateway drug for impressionable music-obsessives-in-waiting. I’m like Hyden in this regard — a guy who first decided I was a Bruce fan in grade school, years before the self-loathing and political disenchantment elucidated in “Dancing in the Dark” and “My Hometown” would hold any rational meaning for me.

Hyden is an imaginative cultural omnivore, which means his critical examination occasionally takes the form of something like fan fiction. What if, for example, the Boss had decided to pursue his flirtation with acting — something we’d later get a taste of in the John Sayles-directed music videos for “Glory Days” and “I’m on Fire” — and agreed to star in “Taxi Driver” screenwriter Paul Schrader’s melodrama “Born in the U.S.A.” in 1979? In our universe, Springsteen simply pocketed the title of Schrader’s screenplay, repaying the filmmaker by writing a title song for the movie that was eventually released as “Light of Day,” starring Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett. But Hyden builds out this alternate timeline, wherein Springsteen, not Richard Gere, plays the lead role in Schrader’s “American Gigolo,” and then Springsteen, not David Bowie, writes and performs the title song for Schrader’s kinky 1982 remake of the ’40s horror flick “Cat People.” Not profound , maybe, but fun to ponder.

Or what if Springsteen had followed up “Born in the U.S.A.” with a sequel album made up of leftovers from the same sessions? Hyden presents his suggested track list for “Man at the Top,” the 1985 Springsteen album that never was (though all its songs are real), awarding it four out of five stars in an imaginary Rolling Stone review. More intriguingly, he posits a future-past wherein the early-’90s emergence of stars like Billy Ray Cyrus and Garth Brooks persuades Springsteen that heartland rock has gone country, and he repositions himself accordingly.

Your appetite for these kinds of fanboy thought experiments is a reliable gauge of whether this book is for you. If Springsteen’s red-headband, swole-arms incarnation is the only one you’d recognize at a costume party, it might not be. But if the sight of a bejeweled, haunted-looking man with slicked-back hair and a goatee makes your brain say, “‘Tom Joad’-era Bruce,” it definitely is.

Chris Klimek is a writer, critic and podcast host in Washington.

There Was Nothing You Could Do

Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland

By Steven Hyden

Hachette. 272 pp. $32

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25 Great Writers and Thinkers Weigh In on Books That Matter

To celebrate the Book Review’s 125th anniversary, we’re dipping into the archives to revisit our most thrilling, memorable and thought-provoking coverage.

Damon Winter/The New York Times (Toni Morrison); Henry Clarke/Conde Nast, via Getty Images (Joan Didion); Ulf Andersen/Getty Images (Patricia Highsmith); Andre D. Wagner for The New York Times (Patti Smith); Oliver Morris/Getty Images (Kurt Vonnegut); Ulf Andersen/Getty Images (James Baldwin) Credit...

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By Tina Jordan ,  Noor Qasim and John Williams

• Published Jan. 25, 2021 Updated Oct. 26, 2021

On Oct. 10, 1896, after years of robust literary coverage at The New York Times, the paper published the first issue of the Book Review.

In the 125 years since, that coverage has broadened and deepened. The Book Review has become a lens through which to view not just literature but the world at large, with scholars and thinkers weighing in on all of the people and issues and subjects covered in books on philosophy, art, science, economics, history and more.

In many ways, the Book Review’s history is that of American letters, and we’ll be using our 125th anniversary this year to celebrate and examine that history over the coming months. In essays, photo stories, timelines and other formats, we’ll highlight the books and authors that made it all possible.

Because, really, writers are at the heart of everything we do. Pairing a book with the right reviewer is a challenge, one that we relish. And we’ve been fortunate to feature the writing of so many illustrious figures in our pages — novelists, musicians, presidents, Nobel winners, CEOs, poets, playwrights — all offering their insights with wit and flair. Here are 25 of them.

H.G. Wells | Vladimir Nabokov | Tennessee Williams | Patricia Highsmith | Shirley Jackson | Eudora Welty | Langston Hughes | Dorothy Parker | John F. Kennedy | Nora Ephron | Toni Morrison | John Kenneth Galbraith | Nikki Giovanni | James Baldwin | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | Joan Didion | Derek Walcott | Margaret Atwood | Ursula K. Le Guin | Stephen King | Jhumpa Lahiri | Mario Vargas Llosa | Colson Whitehead | Patti Smith | Bill Gates

Tell us: Who are the writers who have inspired you?

On Morley Roberts’s “The Private Life of Henry Maitland”

H.G. Wells, the author of science fiction classics like “The Time Machine” and “The War of the Worlds,” admitted that he had a personal interest in this work about his fellow author George Gissing (who was oddly given the pseudonym Henry Maitland in a book that was clearly about him). “In so far that I have on several occasions encouraged Mr. Roberts to write it,” Wells wrote, “I feel myself a little involved in the responsibility for it.” He must have left Roberts feeling a bit less than grateful for the encouragement when he judged: “It is no use pretending that Mr. Roberts’s book is not downright bad, careless in statement, squalid in effect, poor as criticism, weakly planned and entirely without any literary distinction.”

Vladimir Nabokov

On jean-paul sartre’s “nausea”.

Nabokov was not yet a household name in the United States (that would come about a decade later, with the publication here of “Lolita”) when he reviewed Sartre’s philosophical novel about Antoine Roquentin, a French historian troubled by the very fact of existence. “Sartre’s name, I understand, is associated with a fashionable brand of cafe philosophy, and since for every so-called ‘existentialist’ one finds quite a few ‘suctorialists’ (if I may coin a polite term), this made-in-England translation of Sartre’s first novel, ‘La Nausée,’ should enjoy some success.”

Tennessee Williams

On paul bowles’s “the sheltering sky”.

Williams, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” reviewed this debut novel by Bowles, which went on to be acclaimed as one of the best of the 20th century. The story mercilessly follows a young married couple from New York adrift in the North African desert. “I suspect that a good many people will read this book,” Williams wrote, “without once suspecting that it contains a mirror of what is most terrifying and cryptic within the Sahara of moral nihilism, into which the race of man now seems to be wandering blindly.”

Patricia Highsmith

On r. frison-roche’s “first on the rope”.

When she wrote this brief review, Patricia Highsmith was the author of one novel, “Strangers on a Train.” She would go on to worldwide fame for that and other thrillers, including the ones that feature Tom Ripley. The author she reviewed, the French mountaineer R. Frison-Roche, is now relatively obscure. “This is exactly the kind of novel one would expect a Chamonix guide to write — blunt in style and treatment, unevenly paced, about mountain climbing, of course, and authentic down to the last piton, the last breathtaking moment before the summit.” More tantalizingly, Highsmith added: “There is a delightful and unexpected chapter about a cow battle that is fully as dramatic as the mountain scaling.”

Shirley Jackson

On red smith’s “out of the red”.

One of the stranger matchups of big names in our archives is this review of the sports columnist Red Smith’s work by Shirley Jackson, the author of “The Lottery” and “The Haunting of Hill House.” Jackson wrote about her enjoyment of watching sports on TV. Though she had “limited knowledge” of sportswriters at the time, Smith’s book won her over. “There are some otherwise modest, sensitive females — I am among them — who are become brazen snatchers of the sports page from the morning paper, and only a book like Red Smith’s shows me what I have been missing by not getting into this field sooner. Reading ‘Out of the Red’ has been, actually, an educational experience unlike almost anything I have known since first looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

Eudora Welty

On e.b. white’s “charlotte’s web”.

Eudora Welty’s review of this timeless tale is a sheer delight, starting from its headline (“Life in the Barn Was Very Good”) and its first sentence (“E.B. White has written his book for children, which is nice for us older ones as it calls for big type”). Unlike contemporary reviews that get future classics “wrong,” Welty — who worked briefly as an editor at the Book Review during World War II — saw this accomplishment clear in the moment. “What the book is about is friendship on earth, affection and protection, adventure and miracle, life and death, trust and treachery, pleasure and pain, and the passing of time,” she wrote. “As a piece of work it is just about perfect, and just about magical in the way it is done.”

Langston Hughes

On james baldwin’s “notes of a native son”.

In this review, Langston Hughes, an eminent literary figure and chronicler of the Black experience in the United States, took the measure of this first collection of essays by Baldwin. He was impressed: “He uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing.” He suggested that Baldwin still had room to grow, but that “America and the world might well have a major contemporary commentator.”

Dorothy Parker

On s.j. perelman’s “the road to miltown”.

To no one’s surprise, Dorothy Parker, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, was funny in this review of work by her fellow humor writer. She begins it: “It is a strange force that compels a writer to be a humorist. It is a strange force, if you care to go back farther, that compels anyone to be a writer at all, but this is neither the time nor the place to bring up that matter. The writer’s way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?” But while Parker was part of a “vicious circle,” and known for her piercing barbs, she happily praised Perelman, who, she wrote, “stands alone” in his field.

John F. Kennedy

On arthur larson’s “what we are for”.

John F. Kennedy was the author of three books and still a Massachusetts senator when he reviewed this book, an attempt to define for the world what America believed in beyond simply opposition to the Soviet Union and Communism. Larson was a Republican who had worked with labor issues and had been a top speechwriter for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. “Though the book’s style is somewhat discursive and here and there perhaps a trifle condescending,” Kennedy wrote, “Mr. Larson does succeed very well in portraying the dangers of analyzing American society in terms of class distinctions or rigid economic interests. Though it is not a new theme, he is very successful in reminding us of the ‘kaleidoscope of apparently inexplicable mixtures of political coloration across the landscape.’”

Nora Ephron

On rex reed’s “do you sleep in the nude”.

In this review, the filmmaker, director and writer Nora Ephron marveled at how the young Reed got his show-business subjects to say the things they said to him. Those subjects included Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty and Lucille Ball. Ephron’s opening is a classic: “Rex Reed is a saucy, snoopy, bitchy man who sees with sharp eyes and writes with a mean pen and succeeds in making voyeurs of us all. If any of this sounds like I don’t like Rex Reed, let me correct that impression. I love Rex Reed.”

Toni Morrison

On toni cade bambara’s “tales and stories for black folks”.

Toni Morrison had just one novel under her belt when this review was published in 1971. One of the joys in our archives is to see — in retrospect — the understated descriptions of those who wrote for us. Morrison’s read: “Toni Morrison, an editor in a New York publishing house, is the author of ‘The Bluest Eye.’” “It is a most remarkable collection,” she wrote of Bambara’s work. “Joy aches and pain chuckles in these pages, and the entire book leaves you with the impression of silk — which is so nice because it was made by a living thing that had something on its mind, its survival no doubt.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

On chester bowles’s “my years in public life”.

“Truth, not unconvincing humility, is the grandest virtue and accordingly I may observe that I am better qualified than any man alive to review a book on the public life of Chester Bowles.” The iconoclastic economist and prolific author John Kenneth Galbraith began his review this way because he and Bowles had held some of the same positions of power and had worked together on presidential campaigns. In so doing, they had become friends, which, Galbraith wrote, “is a disadvantage only if the book in question is bad. Only then do you have to consider whether the author should get the truth from you or someone else. This, fortunately, is an extremely good book.”

Nikki Giovanni

On virginia hamilton’s “m.c. higgins, the great”.

The acclaimed poet Nikki Giovanni has written verse for children as well as adults, so she was the ideal reviewer for this novel, which was written for young readers but dealt with difficult, mature subjects. Hamilton’s novel, which won a Newbery Medal and a National Book Award, concerns a young boy hoping to save a local mountain from the ravages of strip mining. “‘M.C. Higgins, the Great’ is not an adorable book, not a lived‐happily‐ever‐after kind of story. It is warm, humane and hopeful and does what every book should do — creates characters with whom we can identify and for whom we care. … We’re glad Miss Hamilton is a writer. It makes the world just a little bit richer and our lives just a little bit warmer.”

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

On tom wicker’s “a time to die”.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. reviewed this account of the 1971 uprising at Attica prison written by Tom Wicker, who was a reporter, columnist and editor for The Times. The book mixed its reportage about the dramatic events at the prison with passages of autobiography. Leave it to Vonnegut to come up with a memorable comparison for what resulted: “The book is designed like a shish kebab, with novelistic scenes from ‘Wicker’s’ childhood and youth alternating with hard‐edged episodes from Attica, and with Tom Wicker himself as the skewer. The materials placed shoulder‐to‐shoulder on the skewer are as unlike as ripe peaches and hand grenades.”

James Baldwin

On alex haley’s “roots”.

The Book Review has always taken pride in finding the right reviewers for the right books, and that is only heightened when a book is a true event, like Alex Haley’s “Roots,” which spent months at No. 1 on The Times’s best-seller list. The great James Baldwin’s piece is something still worth reading and considering today. He wrote of “Roots”: “It suggests with great power, how each of us, however unconsciously, can’t but be the vehicle of the history which has produced us. Well, we can perish in this vehicle, children, or we can move on up the road.”

Joan Didion

On norman mailer’s “the executioner’s song”.

Talk about two heavyweights. On the cover of our Oct. 7, 1979, issue, Didion reviewed Mailer’s epic, genre-defying novel about the infamous Gary Gilmore, who murdered two people in Utah and later demanded that the state follow through with his execution for the crime. Much more than just the story of a crime and a very public death penalty debate, Mailer’s book captured the desperate side of life in the American West. “I think no one but Mailer could have dared this book,” Didion wrote. “The authentic Western voice, the voice heard in ‘The Executioner’s Song,’ is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature, the reason being that to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down.”

Derek Walcott

On “the glorious flight: across the channel with louis blériot, july 25, 1909” by alice and martin provensen.

The poet Derek Walcott, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, reviewed this book about the French aviator Louis Blériot and his flight across the English Channel, 18 years before Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic. “Gaiety and true bravery are close in legend, and this spaciously crafted and modestly presented book is very much in the spirit of its subject,” Walcott wrote. “Fact is turned into magic, very quietly. The return to innocence requires gay and brave strides; the light on the way there is direct, the flight natural and simple, and ‘The Glorious Flight’ has made it.”

Margaret Atwood

On toni morrison’s “beloved”.

Sometimes a book that will become an undisputed classic is met at the moment of its publication with appropriate awe. Such was the case with Morrison’s “Beloved,” a remarkable ghost story set in the years after the Civil War. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and in 2006 was named the best novel of the previous 25 years by a group of prominent writers, critics and editors polled by the Book Review. In her original review of the book in 1987, Margaret Atwood — the author of her own classics, like “The Handmaid’s Tale” — wrote: “‘Beloved’ is Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, and another triumph. Indeed, Morrison’s versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, ‘Beloved’ will put them to rest. In three words or less, it’s a hair-raiser.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

On j.g. ballard’s “war fever”.

The critic Harold Bloom once said that Ursula K. Le Guin had “raised fantasy into high literature for our time.” In this review of another iconic writer of literary science fiction, Le Guin captured the scope and relevance of Ballard’s themes. “The brilliant, obsessive fictions of J.G. Ballard circle through a round of almost canonical topics of modernist literature and film: the Conradian jungle and its white folk, consumerist America and the ugly American, popular cult figures such as astronauts and film stars, T.S. Eliot’s ‘waste land’ and ‘unreal city.’ Through these and other landscapes of alienation, stock figures move in meticulous patterns toward a predictably shocking conclusion. The voltage is high, but it’s all in the mind.”

Stephen King

On thomas harris’s “hannibal”.

Dark imaginations collide in this review. (If Thomas Harris hadn’t invented Hannibal Lecter, perhaps eventually Stephen King would have?) This was Lecter’s first appearance in a novel in 11 years — and the first since the film adaptation of “The Silence of the Lambs” had made him a household name. “I don’t think many of the Danielle Steel crowd will be rushing out to buy a book in which one character is eaten from the inside out by a ravenous moray eel — but for those who like what Harris can do so brilliantly, no book report is required.”

Jhumpa Lahiri

On mohsin hamid’s “moth smoke”.

We like to keep our eyes peeled for the newest talents here at the Book Review, and here is a vintage example. About a month after this review was published, Jhumpa Lahiri would win a Pulitzer Prize for her debut collection of stories, “Interpreter of Maladies.” And here she was reviewing the debut novel by Mohsin Hamid, who was embarking on his own award-winning career. “Like Fitzgerald, Hamid writes about the slippery ties between the extremely wealthy and those who hover, and generally stumble, in money’s glare,” Lahiri wrote. “Hamid also sets the action over a single, degenerate summer, when passions run high and moral lassitude prevails. And like Fitzgerald, Hamid probes the vulgarity and violence that lurk beneath a surface of affluence and ease.”

Mario Vargas Llosa

On suzanne jill levine’s “manuel puig and the spider woman”.

The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, delivered a sweeping review of this biography of the Argentine writer Manuel Puig. In it, Vargas Llosa considered everything from the influence of the movies on Puig to what made his work so original to whether that work has the “revolutionary transcendence attributed to it by Levine and other critics.” He praised Levine’s own work: “This fascinating book is indispensable for anyone interested in Puig’s work (which Levine, the translator of several of his novels into English, knows to perfection) and in the close connection between film and literature, a defining characteristic of cultural life in the late 20th century; both are described with intelligence and an abundance of information. I found occasional errors, but these in no way diminish the virtues of a book in which rigor and readability walk arm in arm.”

Colson Whitehead

On richard powers’s “the echo maker”.

As we celebrate 125 years of the Book Review, we’ll spend time not just in the distant past but in the vibrant present. Few writers this century are as acclaimed as Colson Whitehead, the author of several novels and the winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for “The Underground Railroad” (2016). In 2019, Richard Powers joined the list of Pulitzer winners as well, for “The Overstory.” But back in 2006, when both were simply very acclaimed authors, Whitehead reviewed this novel about a man who suffers from a rare cognitive disorder after a near-fatal car accident. “Part of the joy of reading Powers over the years has been his capacity for revelation,” Whitehead wrote. “His scientific discourses point to how the world works, but the struggles of his characters … help us understand how we work.”

Patti Smith

On haruki murakami’s “colorless tsukuru tazaki and his years of pilgrimage”.

A longtime rock star and poet, Patti Smith became an award-winning memoirist with the publication of “Just Kids” in 2010. We also think she’s a fine reviewer. She brought her deep knowledge of the work of Haruki Murakami to this assessment of his 13th novel. “This is a book for both the new and experienced reader. It has a strange casualness, as if it unfolded as Murakami wrote it; at times, it seems like a prequel to a whole other narrative. The feel is uneven, the dialogue somewhat stilted, either by design or flawed in translation. Yet there are moments of epiphany gracefully expressed, especially in regard to how people affect one another.”

On Yuval Noah Harari’s “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”

Yes, we love to publish work by prominent novelists, essayists, poets, journalists, historians. But sometimes it’s a thrill to have someone weigh in who is (very, very well) known for something other than books. And who better to review a look at the 21st century than Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, who did so much to shape the world we live in? “Harari is such a stimulating writer that even when I disagreed, I wanted to keep reading and thinking. All three of his books wrestle with some version of the same question: What will give our lives meaning in the decades and centuries ahead? … It’s no criticism to say that Harari hasn’t produced a satisfying answer yet. Neither has anyone else. So I hope he turns more fully to this question in the future.”

Explore More in Books

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An assault led to Chanel Miller’s best seller, “Know My Name,” but she had wanted to write children’s books since the second grade. She’s done that now  with “Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All.”

When Reese Witherspoon is making selections for her book club , she wants books by women, with women at the center of the action who save themselves.

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Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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Empty Mirror

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10 places to find reviewers for your self-published book

But before we get to that – and before you start to contact reviewers – it’s important to understand how to contact them.

What to do:

1. Do your research. Only contact reviewers who are interested in reviewing the type of books you have written. (See below for some good places to find the right reviewers.)

2. Read their review policy. Do they only want e-books, or printed books? What genres are they currently interested in reading? Are they currently accepting new books for review? Check out their rules, and follow them.

3. Write a personalized email to the potential reviewer. No one likes to get a form letter, or spam. Use a salutation, and their name – not just “Hi” or “Dear reviewer,” but rather, “Dear Jane Smith” or at least “Dear Jane.” If there’s no personal name listed, use their username.

Tell the reviewer who you are, how you found them, a little bit about your book, when it will be published. Tell them that if they’re interested, you’d be glad to send them a copy. Specify what format the book will be in (which ebook format, printed book, or if they will have a choice). Thank them for their time and consideration, and say that you look forward to hearing from them. Then sign it, with your full name.

Don’t forget the subject line, either: emails with the subject “Review Inquiry” or “Review Request” will get a better response as they make it easy to identify what your message is about.

Here’s how to write an excellent review query.

4. Before sending your email, spell-check and proofread. Errors leave a poor impression and make the reviewer less likely to accept your book. They’ll figure your book is full of typos, too.

5. The ultimate purpose of a review isn’t to please you. Books with reviews do tend to sell better. However, it’s important to understand that reviewers ultimately aren’t written for the author’s benefit. They’re written for the potential reader to give them enough information so that they can make a purchasing decision.

What not to do:

1. If they do accept the book, don’t expect the reviewer to guarantee a review. Reviewers don’t accept books they have no intention of reviewing, but sometimes they may not be able to – or wish to – eventually review it. That’s OK. They’re not the only reviewer out there. Move on.

2. Don’t expect, or ask for, a positive review. No reviewer can promise this. Any reviewer worth approaching has integrity and will always post an honest review, whether one star or five. (As people’s opinions will naturally vary, there’s often something fishy when books have only five-star reviews, anyway.)

3. Don’t ask the reviewer to promise a review to be published on or near a particular date. (Do feel free to tell the reviewer the date of your book’s publication.) Please understand that most reviewers have a big stack of books to review. Reviews take more time than you might think. The reviewer reads the book – maybe more than once – takes notes, then writes and posts the review. You’re asking them to do at least several hours of work for you, on their own time, for free. And they’re not doing it for money, but rather for the love of books, and of reviewing.

This is why you can’t expect a promise of a review by a certain date (or even at all). It’s understandable that you’re anxious for the reviews to start rolling in, but just hang tight, keep soliciting reviews, and one day you’ll have a bunch of them.

4. Never offer payment for a review. All an honest reviewer will accept is the book itself. Don’t offer a bribe! Paid reviews are not allowed on any reputable websites and can get the reviewer – and sometimes yourself – in a world of trouble, and banned from review websites.

5. Don’t expect an answer to your query. I know – that almost seems unreasonable, doesn’t it, not to expect the reviewer to reply. The reason that some don’t reply is that many reviewers – especially popular and highly-ranked ones – get so many review queries that it takes too much time to reply to them all. So, they wind up only replying to those they have an interest in reviewing.

6. If a potential reviewer declines to review your book, take it graciously. Don’t ask why, try to change their mind, or pester them. Stay on good terms – reply briefly with thanks for their time and consideration. Who knows, perhaps they’ll review your next book.

7. After a review is published, don’t comment on the review . Not even if you disagree with it. Even if the reviewer says something terribly wrong, even factually wrong. Even if they say it’s the best book they’ve ever read. Or the worst! Commenting can make you look petty, overbearing or argumentative, and can turn potential readers against you, ensuring they never read your book. Just. Don’t. Do. It. Ever. ( Here’s why. )

10 places to find reviewers for your books.

OK. Now that you understand how to approach reviewers, how do you find them?

1. Amazon’s “Meet Our Authors” Forum

Amazon has “Meet Our Authors” forum where you can introduce yourself, and also ask for reviews. There are various genre-specific threads too.

Update: Amazon has shut down all of their forums. They suggest that you visit Goodreads instead, where it’s easy for authors to interact with readers. (Amazon owns Goodreads.) See #4 on this list for more about Goodreads.

2. Amazon’s Top Reviewers

Amazon ranks its reviewers according to a variety of criteria and publishes the list. You can go through the list to look for those reviewers who review books in your genre. It will take some time. Those reviewers who include an email address or website in their profile are usually open to being contacted regarding potential reviews. (Some are not.) Before emailing, read their reviews of books in your genre. Pay close attention to any review guidelines which are included in the reviewer’s profile.

TheCreativePenn has a great blog post on getting Amazon reviewers to review your book .

3. Peruse the Amazon book pages

Check out other books similar to yours, and see who’s reviewed them. Look on these reviewers’ profiles to see if they’re open to review offers, as described above. If so, contact them.

4. LibraryThing & Goodreads

On LibraryThing , people catalog, review, and discuss books. The site also functions as a social networking site and is a great place for authors to connect with potential readers. There are lots of things you can do to get the word out about your book here. One of them is to find reviewers.

LibraryThing offers the “Member Giveaway” – where you can give out your own books. Ebooks and printed books are equally welcome. You set a number of available books to offer, and people will enter a drawing to win them. Usually there are more people who sign up than available books, so there is a drawing at the end of the giveaway period.

Though those who receive your books are not required to review your book, you can let it be known that you hope they do. LibraryThing reviewers can post their reviews on that site, but some often post their reviews elsewhere, such as Amazon.com and Goodreads.

Goodreads is similar to LibraryThing, but bigger. Only publishers can give away books for free there, but you can still find potential reviewers through their groups , some of which are dedicated to connecting authors with reviewers. (Use the group search box to find them.) Before posting review opportunities, be sure to check that the rules of the particular group allow it.

5. Social networking sites

Search for people who review your genre of book on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites, and start making connections. Much has been written elsewhere on how to connect with people on these sites, so that’s all I’ll say about it here.

Turn to Google to find bloggers who review books similar to yours. Try various searches such as the name of your genre (e.g. YA, poetry, American history, vampire fiction) followed by one of these phrases: book blog, book blogger, book reviews, book review blog, book review blogger. Try various combinations and think of some of your own, investigate the results, and you’re bound to come up with some good ones.

7. Services which connect authors and reviewers

There are quite a lot of specialized websites which will make your book available to reviewers. Here are a few we know of:

The Bookbag . Publishes book reviews on their site, with links to the books on Amazon.

4226 Spruce St . Makes it easy for authors of Kindle books to connect with Amazon reviewers. Free.

8. Reviewer directories and lists

The Book Blogger List . A categorized directory of book reviewers, organized by genre, which makes it easy to locate potential reviewers for your book. Free.

Book Reviewer Yellow Pages (formerly Step By Step Self Publishing). Offers an online directory of book reviewers. It’s free, but they also offer paid Kindle and paperback versions.

List of literary / poetry review publications (many print-based)

9. Ask other authors

Ask other authors you’re acquainted with – either on or offline – who reviewed their book, and who they think you should get in touch with. Most authors are very willing to share their experiences and recommendations. When writing to a reviewer, be sure mention that your fellow author recommended that you contact them.

10. Look close to home & offline

There are plenty of local, offline sources for reviews, too:

• local daily or weekly newspapers
• school newspapers
• organization and company newsletters
• contact local indie bookstores to see if they know of any local reviewers

11. (yeah, forget 10 – we’re turning this baby all the way up to 11!) The Indie View

The Indie View has a great list of reviewers in a number of genres. They also spotlight reviews and authors. Check it out.

don’t forget us

You know, if your book is arts-related nonfiction, or has anything to do with the Beat Generation, you might check out our very own review policy . We don’t accept many books for review – but you never know until you try! We also sometimes publish author interviews and book excerpts.

Summing up…

That’s all for now. If you have suggestions about getting reviews, please leave a comment. And stay tuned for more articles about promoting your self-published books!

Empty Mirror publishes new poetry, criticism, essays, book reviews, and art every Friday.

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Pat Sutton says

March 4, 2020 at 11:53 am

Denise, thank you, Your comments and explanations will save me time on how to find a reviewer and what to expect.

Antonio Chevalier says

October 11, 2020 at 3:47 pm

You need to pay for The Bookbag. Publishes book reviews on their site, with links to the books on Amazon.

Empty Mirror says

November 8, 2019 at 4:50 pm

There’s also a directory of over 300 reviewers, sorted by posting frequency, at https://indiestoday.com/reviewers-list/ . Thanks to Dave Allen for pointing out this resource!

Derrick Washington says

October 31, 2019 at 7:13 pm

Hi, Denise, I just want to say thank you for sharing this information. I have been searching online where to find book reviewers, and your blog answered, pretty much, all of my questions. Once again, thanks.

Bruce Miller says

October 16, 2019 at 2:36 pm

Excellent article and we enjoyed reading it. It is very comprehensive and useful. Well done!

We review books. We are retired people in New Zealand and we are amazed at the creativity and original ideas people have. It’s like sitting in a school class with students raising their hands and announcing amazing creative ideas! We love it. But we only review books we like. No erotica, but most everything else. We’ve done hundreds of reviews. Check us out > https://www.teamgolfwell.com/free-book-reviews.html

Julian Hardy says

July 1, 2019 at 8:44 pm

Denise Thank you for your insightful website. I have recently self-published a book on KDP/Amazon. After doing some research about reviews/reviewers, I found the Artisan Book Reviews website. Is it worthwhile using such services as those provided by Artisan Book Reviews (as they are quite costly). Also, I’m assuming such paid reviews do not contravene Amazon’s review rules. Is this true? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Regards Julian

Denise says

July 29, 2019 at 11:07 am

It’s true that paid reviews are forbidden by Amazon and can’t be posted there by the reviewer.

However, you can post them yourself with your book information on your book’s page. They can also be useful for use on your website and promotional materials.

Thomas Juarez says

May 4, 2019 at 8:16 am

Thank you for the quick reply! While searching through other parts of your website I found someone I made a connection with. Finally gaining some traction (I think).

Awakening Cocijo will be making a book tour to test its worthiness!

May 3, 2019 at 9:24 am

I have recently self published on Amazon, currently Amazon is having an issue tracking my book sales and I am falling in the ratings. I made them aware of some of the recent purchases, they know there’s a problem and they are looking into it…I have faith in them!

In any case, it has been very difficult to find reviewers that are available in the next 3-4 months. It’s been frustrating to say the least.

I paid for the editing of my book so that I would have a polished product. I was hoping this would make my book more attractive to buyers and/or reviewers. I would be more than happy to provide a pdf or kindle copy to potential reviewers.

The book is called Awakening Cocijo and is available only on Amazon. It is a metaphysical fiction book centering on the Zapotec empire and a current attempt (fictional, of course), to awaken Cocijo…the god of lightening and rain.

May 3, 2019 at 2:13 pm

You might try getting reviews via Goodreads (you can even give away free books/ebooks in Goodreads’ Member Giveaway). That might give you some reviews in shorter than three or four months.

If you’re on social media, you could try giving some copies away for review that way.

Celeste says

April 26, 2019 at 10:55 am

Thanks Denise! I’m going to network as best I can, which means helping other authors with their efforts, too. I joined Goodreads so I could post reviews and hopefully boost the sales of books that I enjoy reading.

April 22, 2019 at 7:57 pm

Denise, thanks for the quick follow-up.

I believe it’s far too time-consuming to find reviewers on Amazon, considering that many of them don’t have contact info available. It’s probably better to invest time and effort in building a network, e.g., through Goodreads and Bookbub. I’m an introvert, so it makes me cringe to think of having to actively pursue getting followers. Otherwise my novel is likely to die on the vine after it’s published, no matter how good it is.

April 25, 2019 at 11:40 am

That’s certainly a valid objection and there are other methods of getting reviews. I wish you success with your novel!

April 21, 2019 at 4:28 pm

This article is dated March 6, 2014, so perhaps something has changed as far as finding book reviewers on Amazon. I went to the Amazon Top Customer Reviewers listing. There are 10,000, with zero indication as to what they review. To find that out, you have to click on each name one by one, then scroll through their reviews to see (1) if they even review books, and (2) what genre of books they review. With 10,000 reviewers, you may be able to go through that list in, oh, let’s say a year. And of course it changes daily so you’ll need to keep a list of whose reviews you looked at.

If someone knows of a better way, I’m all ears. Otherwise, I think Amazon is doing its best, as always, to make things difficult.

April 22, 2019 at 1:34 pm

Yes, you do have to look at each reviewer individually — there’s no list with email addresses included. So, it’s usually best to find books similar to yours, see who’s reviewing them, and get in touch those with contact information (email, website, or even a Google-able name) on their profile. It does take some detective work, for sure.

Diane Fadden says

April 10, 2019 at 6:12 pm

Indiebook review is a scam operation. Buyer beware.

roy tawes says

August 25, 2018 at 10:43 am

Denise- Iasked for a personal review. Never heard back, but I see you’re using my complimentary comments for this website. Just give me a simple yes or know

August 29, 2018 at 10:53 am

Congratulations on the publication of your book! It sounds fascinating.

EM’e review guidelines are here: https://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/empty-mirror-review-policy

Guidelines in short: Due to time constraints, I’m only able to accept very few books for review. I’m looking for specific types of non-fiction and am unable to review fiction, poetry, or memoir.

Unfortunately, due to the volume of book review requests received and that fact that I’m the only one here, I’m only able to reply to those I intend to review. I regret that I’m not able to respond to all.

Comments are voluntary and are not “used” for anything. They can be deleted by request. I did leave the link in your previous comment so that others could check out your book!

best wishes, Denise

Tyrell Perry says

August 19, 2018 at 12:13 pm

Great intel. This newly published author will be putting it to use.

Wilburson says

July 2, 2018 at 6:30 am

This is such useful information Denise, which I have added to my growing information pile on getting reviews. Thanks for taking the time.

Vishal Sharma says

April 6, 2018 at 11:14 pm

Hey Denise, Thanks for sharing such awesome tips loved it. It was very useful for me.

Roy lawson tawes MD , FACS says

January 10, 2018 at 2:22 pm

Very helpful information for INDIE authors.Thank you. I like your considerate style.

It’s a long shot to request a personal review, but you mentioned an interest in the Beat generation that spawned the hippies in the ’60s. I just published my sixth novel, RECALL that deals with the topic . Returning to San Francisco from Vietnam where I served as a flight surgeon, I witnessed the cultural revolution up close and personal. I tried to capture that turbulent era in my historical narrative. You might find it interesting and enlightening. I’m getting good early reviews , but not from anyone of your professional stature. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.So why not ask you?

If you have any interest, please consult my website: RLawsonauthor.com. All the information you require to make a decision is available there, including blogs. Maybe we will find an intellectual connection. Life never follows a straight path, Stranger things have happened. I love writing and hope someone influential in the literary field will promote my work.

Thank you for your consideration. You sound like a nice person in your responses above, trying to help aspiring writers. We need guidance, It’s a maze to navigate.

Brad Foster says

January 3, 2018 at 4:06 am

No worries, Denise – thanks anyway and careful of that perilous tower of books! :)

January 2, 2018 at 6:48 pm

HI Denise – thanks for this post! I noticed that the link to Amazon’s “Meet Our Authors” is defunct – this is what I get: “Our Discussion Boards feature has been discontinued.

Amazon would like to thank the members of this community for contributing to the discussion forums. As we grow and evolve, we encourage you to explore Goodreads Groups for book discussions and Spark for other interests. For device questions and help, please see our new Digital and Device Forum.”

I will try the other tips, though I haven’t had much luck so far with the Amazon Top Reviewers (reminds me of my dating years, when I got completely ignored! ). Say, if you wanted to review my newest e-book, I’d be happy to send you a free copy. No pressure – thanks again and I hope one — if not more — of your points help me out!

January 2, 2018 at 9:08 pm

Hi Brad — Thanks for the update about the Amazon forums. I’d heard about that but had forgotten to update this list. I really appreciate the reminder.

Top reviewers are tough — you really have to find the ones who are into your genre, and Amazon has begun making it tougher to find contact information for them (although email links still appear on individual profiles).

Wish I could help with your book, but I don’t typically read e-books, and my reading stack is perilously tall. But I wish you much success with it!

Cristina G. says

October 21, 2017 at 3:02 am

Gold dust. Thank you so much. I am working on a few new books and I need reviews. Blessings to you and to those who invest their valuable time reading and reviewing our lifetime work.

August 8, 2017 at 8:31 am

Thanks, Denise, for your helpful information.

June 12, 2017 at 3:55 pm

This site looks nice but there are two issues with it: – The reviewer lists can’t be accessed without completing a third-party offer. – Kaspersky shows a warning about a phishing link when the site is loaded.

If you would like to talk about this, please email me. Denise

May 15, 2017 at 6:51 pm

Thanks Denise for a cohesive listing of what to do. It’s early days for me in the world of marketing my children’s mystery novels, so it’s really helpful. Many thanks.

May 15, 2017 at 7:34 pm

Cathy, I’m so glad to hear that you found this article helpful. I wish you much success with the novels!

Indira Sahay says

April 9, 2017 at 9:54 am

Thank you for your reply. I shall certainly take up some of your suggestion

April 8, 2017 at 11:42 am

I was looking for interested reviewers for two Sociology books written by my late husband which remained unpublished when he passed away last year.the first one is already printed and the second one is being got ready for printing. this will take about three months. As the books are academic I would like to send them to academics with similar interests. What do you suggest?

Layla Rose says

March 20, 2017 at 7:03 pm

What a great find. I did some freelance publicity work for an author recently, and as a writer myself, it was sobering to see what it takes as an indie author. So much work. And having a disability which is difficult to manage really slows me down. So I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me.

Walter Stoffel says

March 3, 2017 at 1:23 pm

In part helpful ,in part confusing. Denise, you suggest steering clear of Amazon Top Reviewers(they’re touchy) yet you link to Creative Penn article that outlines process for contacting those same top reviewers.

Lanre Ayanlowo says

February 28, 2017 at 1:41 am

Hello, i have two self published books. Can you please help me publish them traditionally?

March 3, 2017 at 3:13 pm

I wish I could help, but Empty Mirror is just an online magazine; we don’t publish books. I may be able to answer some questions for you, but can’t recommend any particular publishers.

Tom Turkington says

February 21, 2017 at 7:16 pm

Thank you, Denise, so much. As a first-time author and technophobe besides, I’ve despaired of generating any sense of direction in my efforts to get my book into the hands of unbiased readers. Your suggestions are clear, concise and orderly, and likely the jumpstart I’ve needed. Were my book concerned with the arts or the Beats, I’d try to hoist it upon you, but no: it’s a 120,000-word chronicle of the first eighteen years of my life. Trying to make an asset of living in the past. Thanks for your push in the right direction(s).

Marcus De Storm says

January 1, 2017 at 2:36 pm

Thank you Denise for this information useful as a Self Published Author. As it is difficult to find genuine information and where to go to get my book reviewed. This has helped me very much.

January 1, 2017 at 2:37 pm

I’m glad you found the article useful, Marcus! I wish you much success with the book!

Mdu Rohtak says

November 18, 2016 at 5:33 am

Excellent tips, and thanks for the shout-out.

Sheree W. Davis says

November 17, 2016 at 7:52 am

Denise, Thanks for this wonderful check list! I’m a new self-published author and am grateful for the wisdom you are willing to share! God Bless! ~Sheree W. Davis

Johnb9 says

June 8, 2016 at 5:18 am

Thanks so much for the article.Much thanks again. Great.

ferris robinson says

May 2, 2016 at 5:11 am

Denise, Thank you so much for this informative and detailed post! So helpful! And I really appreciate the heads-up on commenting on reviews – I had no idea! I feel like I should be writing them a thank you note for taking the time to read my book, and taking even more time and energy to review it! Thanks for all you do for writers!

January 13, 2016 at 6:56 am

Hi Denise, great article, thanks. Quick question – when do you suggest author start asking for reviews? How long before the publish date – or after the publish date? Thanks.

Alec Stone says

August 20, 2015 at 6:14 am

Hi, don’t forget about reviews-easy.com.

This service is doing all the work for you. You only have to register and search the Amazon the reviewers by categories, products they review or by personal details. Then, a list of reviewers with contact details will be generated and you can download it. Then you can send personalized emails to all of them or do what you want with that data.

August 20, 2015 at 7:25 am

Alec, thanks for the suggestion. I have mixed feelings about Reviews Easy. I haven’t used it myself, but from a brief look at their website, it certainly appears to make it easy to search for Amazon reviewers.

Maybe too easy. I don’t enjoy reading e-books and don’t review them. That fact is stated very clearly on my Amazon profile. And yet, authors very often email to ask me to review their e-books. Some of these authors have told me that they were referred to me by Reviews Easy, and they’ve been surprised that I have no interest in e-books.

It seems that somehow Reviews Easy is leading authors to believe that I want to read e-books. (But since I haven’t used the site, I am not sure how or why this is happening.)

The site may be a good resource. But authors who choose to use it should double-check the reviewers’ profile information and preferences!

Thanks again — Denise

Tim Williams says

August 2, 2015 at 5:06 am

after reading everything that i’ve read i find myself asking …why self publish it seems like more of a pain in the ass then what it’s worth . i mean is this he only way to to go ? i write because i like to write not to share. the only reason publishing has come up is cause everyone that reads my book won’t stop bugging me about it . anyone hit me up cause i don’t see the benefit . thanks

August 3, 2015 at 1:06 pm

Most authors self-publish because they want their work to be read. But there’s no sense in publishing if you don’t feel compelled to.

While most people who write never publish, some of those still have a few books printed for themselves, family and friends who have expressed an interest. It’s an option. And, in that case, you needn’t bother with arranging for reviews, or with other promotional methods.

Others wish to reach a wider readership so look into either traditional or self-publishing, and eventually spend time promoting their book.

If you fall into the latter category, then self-publishing may be for you. But if you don’t, just keep writing for the love of it — and ignore those who pressure you.

all best, Denise

Rena George says

April 10, 2015 at 11:35 pm

Thank you for such a helpful, informative post, Denise. Authors really do need to put in the work to find approachable reviewers – and be prepared to overcome disappointments. Most reviewers are so overburdened that they have closed their lists for the foreseeable future. However the more potential reviewers an author can contact, the greater the chance of success. Perseverance is the secret, I think.

April 11, 2015 at 3:44 pm

Hi Rena, Thanks for your comment. I’m happy to hear that you found the post helpful.

Unfortunately I’m one of those reviewers who is often full-up on books to be reviewed…but I try to make time if just the perfect book is offered. There just isn’t enough time, though, to read – and review – everything I would like to.

Thanks again! Denise

Erik D. Weiss says

March 9, 2015 at 5:47 pm

Thanks, Denise! This is a fantastic little guide, great for new writers like me, eager to get my two fiction books out there. This is great advice, and you’ve inspired me to get to work getting my books reviewed and more visible!! Erik

March 9, 2015 at 7:32 pm

Erik, I’m so glad to hear you found the guide to reviews helpful. Good luck in finding reviewers! – Denise

J Haeske says

January 20, 2015 at 1:56 pm

If I only had known then what I know now… Thanks for that, Denise.

Molly Gambiza says

January 11, 2015 at 6:49 am

Thank you very much for taking your time to share this helpful information. That’s very generous of you. I am after honest reviews for my book A Woman’s Weakness. Now you have given me the directions, the ball is in my hands.

January 11, 2015 at 11:07 am

Glad we could help, Molly! Good luck with the book reviews!

christynathan930 says

September 24, 2014 at 5:28 am

Thanks for the great information and also for great tips too, and now I also check my book reviews.

James Jean-Pierre says

September 8, 2014 at 10:58 am

Thank you for this post, this list will definitely boost up my reviewer count.

August 10, 2014 at 7:55 am

I published my book in may, overlooking the need for a review. Since the time I must have approached 200-300 bloggers/sites for review unsuccessfully. any advice to get a free review? regards, jt

Denise Enck says

August 10, 2014 at 8:43 am

Congratulations on the publication of your book! Getting reviews is definitely a challenge. Without having seen your book or query email, I’m not sure why you haven’t had positive responses to your review query. But a lot depends upon the particular reviewers contacted, and how they are chosen.

First, do your research to find reviewers who review the types of books you write, and who are currently accepting books for review.

For example, I’m a reviewer; I clearly state on my review page here on Empty Mirror that I review Beat Generation and art-related books, do not review fiction, and am not accepting more books for review for the next few months. However, almost every day I receive review queries from authors who didn’t bother to read that; they offer me books about knitting, fantasy fiction, memoirs, guitar chords, children’s books, cooking, and more. I receive a lot of these, and most of them are deleted without reply.

There are websites which categorize book bloggers/reviewers by the genres they review; those can be really helpful in finding the right reviewers. Or go to Amazon and see who has reviewed similar books to yours, and see if they have an email address on their profile.

Second, sometimes it’s in the way that you approach the reviewer. Many queries I’ve received have been very impersonal, had spelling errors (doesn’t bode well for the book), were poorly written, required me to click a link to find out about the book, or wanted me to download free from Amazon on a particular day. Make it easy for the reviewer – address them by name if possible, give a brief synopsis of the book, tell where and when it’s available and in what formats. Don’t require the reviewer to do additional work to find out the basics about your book.

(However, include a link to Amazon – or wherever the book’s sold – so they can investigate more if they want to.)

Your query should contain everything necessary for the reviewer to make a decision.

Also – make sure the book is in good shape and ready for review. Sometimes, before accepting an already-published book for possible review, I’ll read the sample on Amazon to see if it appeals to me. If I find excerpts full of typos, formatting errors, or awkward writing, I won’t accept the book.

It’s harder to find reviewers for some genres than others. For example, fiction, YA and children’s book reviewers are plentiful (though often overburdened); reviewers for non-fiction, art and poetry are a little trickier to find.

But some of it is just timing, and a little bit of luck. Most reviewers get lots of queries and have to turn down even books that sound really enjoyable to them due to time constraints. But following the tips above can give you better odds.

You might also take a look at our article, “How to write an excellent review query” – https://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/publishing/how-to-write-an-excellent-book-review-query

Good luck, JT! If you have further questions, just let me know – I’d be really glad to help. all best, Denise

November 27, 2014 at 1:10 am

Hello Denise, I have a question is that any website which can give all the details of ebooks like how much ebooks are sale and in which with reviews because if any tool provide all of these things in one place it will be really helpful for many publishers.

selfpubber says

April 22, 2014 at 6:06 pm

I’ve used https://www.selfpublishingreview.com/ and it worked out pretty well. It’s a paid review, but it wasn’t a shill review (i.e. overly nice).

February 26, 2014 at 9:13 pm

I’ve used easybookreviews.com a few times. If you are willing to review other books in return it is a guaranteed way to get some (honest) reviews.

I’m also going to try story cartel but my books are already in kdp so I can’t have them available for free anywhere else at the moment. Also, story cartel aren’t amazon verified purchase reviews.

February 27, 2014 at 11:40 am

Thanks for the tip, Emily!

Be careful though, if you’re posting those reviews on Amazon. Amazon doesn’t allow reviews by “reviewing circles” (groups of people who review each other’s books) and has been known to revoke reviewing privileges for those caught doing it.

Gerard Thomas says

November 6, 2013 at 1:02 pm

OMG! I’m so happy now you’ve mentioned everything from A-Z.

Lenita Sheridan says

November 1, 2013 at 9:49 pm

This really helped me. I already got one “yes.” You might tell people to put “Review Request” in the subject line, otherwise they might get ignored the way I did when I put “possible book review?” I learned the hard way, but one website fortunately told me what to do, so I changed my tactic from then on.

November 1, 2013 at 10:04 pm

That’s a great idea, Lenita! Thanks so much. I’ll edit the article to include that. I’m glad you got a good response!

@IolaGoulton says

July 7, 2013 at 6:05 pm

10 ways to find book reviewers (and some useful links) #writing #reviews

June 30, 2013 at 11:35 pm

https://storycartel.com/ is another resource for authors to connect with reviewers.

July 1, 2013 at 8:36 am

Thanks Iola. I hadn’t heard of this one before, but I just checked it out – great resource! – Denise

@marqjonz says

May 28, 2013 at 3:50 am

@Phaedra4Real says

April 2, 2013 at 11:09 am

Dan’s right, great write-up.

ChaoticReader says

April 2, 2013 at 11:02 am

Great article on how and where to find reviewers for your book. https://t.co/wtpNTZszk5

Vennie Kocsis says

March 27, 2013 at 4:32 am

This was so very informative. Thank you for providing these resources for us budding authors.

March 27, 2013 at 11:16 am

So happy to hear you found it helpful! I wish you all the best with your book! – Denise

Rinelle Grey says

March 6, 2013 at 8:38 pm

A very extensive list of resources, I’ll be trying some of these.

One you missed is Goodreads. There are several forums that have dedicated space to helping authors find reviewers. Make sure you check that this is OK though, some groups encourage it, some dislike it.

March 6, 2013 at 9:24 pm

Thanks, Rinelle. I’ll add it. Unlike LibraryThing, GoodReads’ giveaways are only through publishers rather than authors, which is why I left it off the list. But I forgot about the forums! So I’ll add it to the list. Gracias. – Denise

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

Recent features

• My Father’s Map
• Seeing Las Meninas in Madrid, 1994
• Visual poems from 23 Bodhisattvas by Chris Stephenson
• Historical Punctum: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard Through the Lens of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
• Panic In The Rear-View Mirror: Exploring The Work of Richard Siken and Ann Gale
• “Art has side effects,” I said.