Yesterday this sickness of mine took my voice, so today I’m going to come clean. I’m going to admit that I can’t get anyone to review my books.
And, you know what? It isn’t the end of the world, and it isn’t a failure in friendship. It isn’t a critique of my content, style, or appeal. Ultimately it’s just one of those things.
My husband remains devoted to me. My mother still adores me. I have a variety of friends who graciously put up with me. They just rarely if ever review my books or any books at all, readers though they tend to be.
If you’re anywhere on the spectrum of emotions regarding your book(‘)s(‘) reviews or lack thereof, this post is for you. There is no secret to getting reviews. Love and guilt both fall short motivating them, it seems, and just maybe reviews aren’t worth the tactics we sometimes revert to in our desperation to get them. And, if we want to write as much as we (likely) want to write, we can’t always wait to count stars!
Henceforth I will continue to hope for reviews, but I will also have more realistic expectation. At least I will try. 🙂 I will wish the same for you.
Likewise, we are not failures if it is hard to find initial readers, feedback, critique, writing groups, etc. We’re just in a more lonesome field than we sometimes think, since, well, reading and writing, reading and editing, reading and responding at all in any way are just different things.
I wish you a happy day and your very own voice. Whether others can hear you or not and whether you can actually speak or not. 🙂
PS. If you take this as a passive aggressive reminder to review my books, I’ll totally accept them, wicked as I am. But I really do plan to grow up about this stuff. No reason for it to hinder me or any of my relationships. No reason to let it add a criticizing voice to my otherwise already occupied mind.
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Between my trilogy of novels (released in 2012) and my non-fixtion work (released in 2014), I have a total of 22 Amazon reviews. I have a few more reviews on blogs and such, but it’s hard to get a sense of how your work is received. Even those to whom I gave free review copies let me down. Of course, as a self-published writer with a full-time job, I just don’t have the time to market my work or solicit reviews more than by word of mouth. At least I’m not counting on writing for my livelihood.
I went back and checked your reviews. I’m really surprised “Lutheran Purgatory” hasn’t had more! I mean, I know people often don’t review novels–though this serves as a reminder that I should read yours–but non-fiction? Non-fiction should be reviewed as a community service.
I will be reviewing soon! Blessed is just the kind of book that I read more slowly, and I won’t do you the disservice of reviewing before I finish!
But, I haven’t, and absolutely should review the children’s books we love and adore.
Can I also say, though, that it peeves me that your books aren’t listed as written by you in Goodreads?
You’re kind, Jen. Thank you. I mean it.
I’m a little confused though. Aren’t my books under Mary J. Moerbe? HOLY COW! CPH set up another profile under Mary Moerbe. Huh. I’ll look into this. Thanks for letting me know!
Blessed comes up on Goodreads listing Christopher Mitchell first.
I can’t attest to the effectiveness, but LibraryThing has a program for giving early copies to potential reviewers.
I actually look up book bloggers in my genre and, like the publishing companies do with street teams/book influencers, ask if they’re interested in being on my “team”….if they are, I email them an ARC, etc. If I can someday, I’d snail-mail bookmarks, etc, too, but I’m still small potatoes right now. 😉