Writers Tricks of the Trade SPRING 2017 ISSUE 2, VOLUME 7 | Page 11

T HE S TRUGGLE C ONTINUES T O F IND
B OOK R EVIEWERS
Fred Rayworth
Finding people to review your book isn’t easy. Let me rephrase that.
Finding people to review your book for F REE isn’t easy.
M ONEY M ONEY M ONEY
As I found out very quickly, the search for people to review my book was no
easy task. That didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of people willing to review it.
Sure, I got flooded with lots of deceptive marketing sites, especially on Twitter
from book reviewers hawking their wares.
“Come to our site. We’ll review your book for free!”
Yeah, sure. Just wait until you get there and see the sneaky ways they
charge you for that “free” book review. Everything you click on is tied into a
PayPal account. Yeah, free my ass.
To top this off, I’ve never heard of any of these reviewers or their web sites.
Ever. Say, I pay between $30 and $200 (I’m not kidding), what do I get?
One of them had the balls to not even guarantee a review. Just put me in
the pool with a pile of others! Yeah, that’s some marketing!
I could go broke marketing my book to a site nobody will ever look at!
L OOKING O UTSIDE T HE B OX
Many of us have lived in more than one place. I certainly have. I got the idea
that I could appeal to the newspapers of all the cities and towns I lived in.
Maybe they had an entertainment section of their paper that would do reviews
for local authors.
I customized each letter to the city, citing details of when I (or we) lived
there and addressed each e-mail to the specific editor, if it was available.
I sent those e-mails out to about a dozen cities and towns. I got exactly one
response. That editor forwarded it on to another editor and that’s the last I
heard from them. None of the others responded.
So much for that outside the box idea!
F RED R AYWORTH
AUTHOR
http://fredrayworth.com
C ONTACTING O LD F RIENDS /A CQUAINTANCES
This has been a mixed bag. I’ve had some success, yet I’ve had plenty of no
responses as well. Part of the problem is the most current info I have on some
of these friends is from several years ago. Though the e-mails and web sites are
still up, the updates are old and I’m not even sure if they still get or even look at
their stuff. However, the few that responded were gold.
W RITERS ’ T RICKS OF THE T RADE
P AGE 3
S PRING 2017