RomanceEverAfter
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People You Should Know A Conversation with Ross Howard, A Cure for Kirby, Meet Monica Davis and Geir Ness. The Beauty of Change Series Historical Romance Column and Book Reviewer: Kaye Hatfield NEW! Sam DeMarco Have you dreamed of starting your own business? Sam DeMarco, owner of Compliance Team, did and he tells us how he made his dream a reality! Photo Gallery Romance & You (Articles) Romantic Memoir
Quotes & Poetry Expand your quotes and poetic horizons by visiting our various Quotes & Poetry categories: Thought of the Week: Time for New Beginnings A series of 8 articles by Melissa Hamilton comprising a collection of principles that will allow you to make your vision for the future a reality. Read about the Amish, India, Philippines, Greece, & Rome.
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"Love to Read: Become A Book Reviewer" Interview
with
Cathy Sova, Senior Editor
I want to thank Cathy for her candid and insightful comments regarding the job of book reviewing. The ladies that perform this labor of love work hard to present commentary they hope will be helpful to the readers who love the romance genre.
______________________________ "The Romance Reader offers in-depth, candid reviews of romance and women's fiction. We always like hearing from potential reviewers, and in fact, we have room for new reviewers on our staff right now. Readers who are interested in becoming a reviewer are asked to contact our publisher at editor@theromancereader.com.Process of Book Reviewer Selection We ask potential reviewers to first go and read some of our reviews so they get a feel for the length (500-800 words) and the style (plot description followed by the reviewer's analysis of what worked and what didn't). We then ask interested readers to submit two sample reviews, one for a book they liked and one for a book they didn't care for. If we like the sample reviews, we'll contact the reader and discuss the reviewing process in more depth. Once a new reviewer is selected, she works with a mentor for a while to get a feel for reviewing and to help establish her "voice". Our mentors are senior reviewers with hundreds of reviews under their belts. Typically, galleys and books are mailed out to a reviewer at least a month ahead of publication date, though that can be tighter if the books don't arrive from the publisher on time. Currently we receive galleys and books from all major romance publishers. Books that are on a tight timeline for a review are noted, but otherwise a reviewer can read them in the order she chooses. We won't give a subgenre, i.e. paranormals, to a reviewer who doesn't normally read them. That wouldn't be fair. We look for well-written reviews that are of a high technical standard. We don't want fan reviews, gushing, etc. We are looking for reviewers who can clearly explain what they liked and what went wrong; what reached them as a reader and what turned them off. It's not enough to say "I just didn't like it" - reviewers need to be clear as to WHY it didn't work, or WHY they loved it, and be able to back those opinions up with specific examples. That's harder than you'd think. Book Reviewers are Dedicated Ninety percent of the interested readers who contact us never send reviews. Some of them are turned off by the fact that our reviewers are unpaid (though the books are free). Some don't like the requirement of 3-4 reviews a month, minimum. (We feel that's necessary for our readers to establish a connection with that reviewer.) Several have written and said "That was a lot harder than I thought". Also, reviewers must finish all books and read them in full, even ones they know they aren't liking halfway through. Readers have the luxury of tossing a book aside if they don't care for it. Reviews are one reader's opinion, something we hear a lot from authors who resent that we didn't like their books. Fair enough; in a way, editors are reviewers, and books get published based on an editor's "review" of a manuscript. If an editor loves it, it gets published; if not, the book never sees the light of day. Just as editors are experienced at looking through piles of manuscripts, our reviewers are experienced readers who have read hundreds, if not thousands, of romance novels. And that's another requirement: we want reviewers who have been reading in the genre for years, not months.Reviewers Need "Tough Skin" Reviewers also need to have a tough skin. I'll go out on a limb here and say that romance is the one genre that has been insulated from much criticism because the literati disdain it, and the only "review" publications available before the advent of the Internet were (and continue to be) basically fanzines whose lowest-rated book is still deemed "Acceptable", or that love every romance printed. The Internet changed that. If a book has weak plotting that hangs by a thread of convenience and characters that act stupidly, well, now there's an avenue for reviewers to say so. Many authors don't like that. I can't tell you how many times we've had an author write to us accusing a reviewer of everything from jealousy to mean-spiritedness, all because that reviewer dared to say her book wasn't very good. A reviewer needs the courage of her convictions. Having said that, our reviews only talk about the book, not the author. That would be unfair. Here's a statistic you might find interesting. In the seven years I've been with The Romance Reader, we've probably received a hundred e-mails from authors complaining about a negative review. "If you can't say something nice, you shouldn't say anything at all", or "Everyone else loves my book, you must not have 'gotten' it", or quoting the fab reviews they received in the print mags. Our sister site, The Mystery Reader, has been online for four years. Do you know how many complaining emails we've gotten from mystery authors? Exactly ONE. And she was a new author. Other genres have candid reviews, and authors take a negative one in stride. They worked hard, wrote the book, it didn't work for everyone, fine, move on. In romance, there's a tendency to personify the book. "It's my baby!" "It's the book of my heart!" rather than a book, a commercial product meant for the consumer market. So, romance reviewers take more flak than I believe they do in other genres. The Romance Reader Reviewers By the way, none of our reviewers are aspiring authors, though a former reviewer just had her second book published. She quit reviewing when her first book got accepted. She's said several times that the hundred or so reviews she wrote made her a better author. In fact, it wasn't until she'd reviewed for a while that her books were accepted for publication. Coincidence? Perhaps. But I maintain that, if authors would review fifty to a hundred books and be forced to pick them apart and explain just what worked and what didn't, the quality of the genre would skyrocket." Information on Book Reviewing for The Romance Reader If you would like to read additional information regarding book review requirements for The Romance Reader, see http://www.theromancereader.com/faq.html.
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