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Topic: Getting started as a book reviewer...
| Author | Message |
| jutta | Posted – 8/19/2008 3:24:21 AM | show profile How does one get started as a book reviewer? It seems like an awfully hard career path and, yet, I see so many questionable reviews around. How have people launched their careers, especially with the dearth of popular literary magazines? Thanks. |
| cynthia.mccloud | Posted – 8/20/2008 4:29:07 PM | show profile | email poster I can address part of your question, I hope. I used to work for a daily newspaper's features department and we staffers reviewed books once in awhile. So it helps to be an insider to even get the books before they're published. Reviewing is no way to try to make money. Few papers carry single reviews. Most carry services -- meaning the reviews come as part of packages of stories that we already buy (subscribe to.) You could try to sell reviews of local books to a local paper. You'd have to get to know who some local authors are -- and be forewarned that some of that stuff, especially vanity presses/print-on-demand is pretty bad. And if you can't find SOMETHING nice to say, the paper might not run your review. I mean, the midsize paper I worked for hesitated to say anything bad about a hometown person. They didn't give glowing reviews either -- they just wrote "so-and-so published a book" and made no judgments good or bad. A friend of mine who has published two books now told me she started out over ten years ago by sending samples and was very lucky. But even now, the occasional ones she does pay less than $100 a shot--and that's pretty good. (Only a few a year.) The difference is the really big papers, and they want big-name people with books or big reviewing reps. You can request review copies/advance reader copies from publishing houses and sometimes you'll get them. But it helps if you can tell them that a review will appear in such-and-such publication. If you get copies and haven't sold the reviews yet, you can get clips by writing the reviews and then posting them on Web sites like Amazon.com. I was trying this in February but I let it slide -- it takes persistence and I have other projects. It's basically giving it away but hey you got a free book and you're putting your work out there for someone to read. Good luck. |
| stephanerd | Posted – 8/20/2008 5:01:11 PM | show profile | email poster ...and I can add only another small slice to the bigger book reviewing pie. For publications such as Publishers Weekly and Bookforum, you should write to editors with a letter of expertise, rather than a pitch for a specific book. Publications like these prefer to assign reviews themselves so as to avoid the dangers of bias and conflict of interest. Of course, publications like these are also not paying very much, and the reviews are brief and un-bylined. One could also pitch reviews to other publications, but it helps if you've already received a galley copy, and you need to convince editors that you're the best person for the job (as you would with any newspaper or magazine pitch). ------ www.freelancedom.com |
