The Truth About Book Reviews is a comprehensive, accessible manual to one of the most important yet mystifying tasks facing an author: promoting their book. Learn to use book reviews in all their diverse permutations and combinations in order to find your book’s ideal reader audience.
Disclosure: I have a business relationship with this book’s publisher, Independent Book Review, and received an advance reader copy of The Truth About Book Reviews with no obligation to review.
What are Book Reviews?
Book reviews provide information about a book to potential readers and purchasers. This information is not written by the book’s author or publisher (or their employees/contractors such as a publicist). Instead a journalist, fellow author, book reviewer/blogger, or reader shares their thoughts about a book with the public. The review may just be a few words from another writer (called a “blurb” or “cover blurb”), a long essay, and every length in between.
We find book reviews in an assortment of places, such as print newspapers and magazines, website product review pages, blogs, and video blogs. Book reviews have a second life in that they are frequently quoted in promotional and marketing materials produced by the author or publisher.
Why Book Reviews?
Books need thoughtful, honest reviews in order to put their best foot forward in public. But how to get them?
The Truth About Book Reviews does a great job of breaking down the phenomenon of book promotion via book reviews. It doesn’t just recommend this method; it also explains in detail how to go about the process. It provides methodical, step-by-step instructions with graphics, lists, and examples.
And while in some ways The Truth About Book Reviews is a technical manual, the style is engaging and personable, instilling confidence that, “yes, you can.” The book is presented in a second-person, conversational voice. A voice that is sympathetic, empowering, and kind yet honest.
Who Needs Book Reviews?
While this book is geared to independent authors, another truth of modern publishing is that just about every published author has many responsibilities for their own book promotion and marketing. Publishers don’t sink the resources they once did into selling books, and an author aiming to find readers must be more proactive than they might expect. And independent authors must absolutely rely on themselves to get the word out about their books.
Reader Experience
The Truth About Book Reviews came to me at an ideal time; I have a new book coming out in November. And while I’ve already been through the process with my first novel, this book brought so much to the table that I hadn’t thought about before. A lot more!
Perhaps because I read The Truth straight through and before bed each night, the tasks laid out were a bit overwhelming. Even with the book’s calm, reassuring voice telling me, “You don’t have to do all this. You do you. It will be fine,” I did have trouble sleeping on it.
I’d suggest to readers that, while a big picture survey is good, they will be well served to plot out their course in a stepwise fashion over a course of weeks and months. Pace yourself not just in the work, but in the emotional energy expenditure, as well!
Writers want to tell stories, and the book promotion and marketing side of publishing is something from which we’d often rather hide. But, when you are ready to peek out from under the bed and help your book find its readers, The Truth About Book Reviews is ready to be your guide.
If you found The Truth About Book Reviews interesting (or alarming), you might enjoy reading my blog about Jeff VanderMeer’s BookLife.
Click here to order The Big Cinch, a supernatural noir novel from Kathy L. Brown.
And Now a Word from Our Sponsor
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Want More, Now?
“The Pixie Job” in Marathonarium: Volume 2 is available from Amazon. The anthology’s official launch will be at the Imaginarium Convention in Louisville, Kentucky, USA July 18, 2025. Sean Joye’s first out-of-town paranormal investigator job finds him in a small lead-mining community. The mine owner claims his house is infested with pixies, but Sean has his doubts the problem is that simple.
Check out my short story, “Big Magick,” which appears in the St. Louis Writers Guild anthology, Weird STL. Look for it on Amazon. Find out what really happened to the 1904 World’s Fair Ferris Wheel, direct from one of The Big Cinch baddies, Joseph Arwald. Hint: it involves magic.
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