1. I am biased. If you are Richard J. Foster, whose new book I'm still reading today, or Margaret Atwood or Alice Walker or Laura Ingraham or Amy Tan or someone else whose books I've been collecting as fast as I can find them for forty years, your book is likely to move up the list faster; if it's an e-book I may be typing a samizdat copy as I read. But I do read new, unknown, independent authors like Jazalyn. The authors I've been following for forty years are going to retire and I'd love to discover the young people who are going to replace them.
2. I like diversity but I'm not obsessed with it. White male authors are welcome too.
3. I do get "booked up" from time to time. I can't promise a date. If you or your publisher insist on using a temporary format, please be sure it lasts 60 days, and 90 days would be safer.
4. I don't read on "phones." I use laptops. The two I really like have older versions of Windows; the Unsatisfactory Toshiba has Windows 10. Due to the economic effects of the coronavirus panic and the ecological consequences of electronic waste, I really think we must push back against any attempt to force sales of new electronics, so any suggestion that I add any more devices or even apps will cause ill feeling. Formats we use here include:
* Microsoft Word (you can protect a .doc or ..docx file)
* Libre Office (.odt)
* Google Docs (.doc)
* .PDF (you can protect a .pdf file, too)
* Plain text (.txt) or rich text (.rtf)
* Adobe Digital Editions (.epub)
* Calibre
* Kindle for Amazon (.mobi)--be sure it's the version for PC's, NOT the one for "phones"
That gives you eight options. Eight should be enough. Word, Libre, and PDF documents can be read offline, which may get them read sooner than documents that have to be read online.
5. Books printed in French or Spanish will be read, but will be reviewed only in English. I read English faster than French or Spanish, so reviews of an English translation, if any, are likely to be published sooner than reviews of books in other languages.
6. a. Rambly blog reviews and terse Goodreads, Library Thing, and/or Net Galley reviews cost you one copy of a book.
b. Amazon reviews cost you $50 in online book purchases. That's Amazon's requirement not mine; if you have multiple books in print you may purchase copies of all of them, if not you must add titles from my Wish List, and somebody must use a temporary password to make the online purchase through my account. However, all Amazon reviews go live at once and are likely to stay live for years, and you pay for only one batch of Amazon reviews at a time.
c. Reviews in literary magazines are harder to control; editors pay for those when they print them, so you don't have to pay for them, only understand that there are lots of bizarre reasons why one book gets featured in a lit. mag. and another book does not. Editors of well read magazines have lots of good reviews to choose from, so they're likely to decide to publish only the three reviews of books that mention online games, or the five reviews of books from Australia. If I find a book thought-provoking enough I'm likely to write a long-form literary essay about it, but I never know which, if any, lit. mag. will buy the essay.
7. I read most genres and topics. It's easier to list what I don't read:
NO
* Languages other than English, French, or Spanish
* Detailed descriptions of nonconsensual sex, sex acts involving children or animals, or sex acts that cause pain or injury, as pleasure. Such acts may be reported as the crimes they are, in a crime or war story. Police write-ups are good examples of how to refer to them.
(A woman's "no" should always be understood to mean "no," though some writers might have fun with a romance involving an oldfashioned woman who said "no" when she meant "yes" and a modern enlightened man with whom she spent several chapters angling for another chance.)
* Hatespews. I defend the right to publish hatespews; that does not mean I'm going to promote them.
* Misogyny. Incompetent or evil women characters in fiction are acceptable if they appear in contrast to normal ones. I'm less sensitive about misandry because some women really have known only abusive men, but that's likely to be noted as a flaw in the book. I don't mind a book that acknowledges that some people's reasons for "gender transitions" or for recommending them are evil, because that's true, but if you mention gender confusion you should be aware that it can be biologically based and not evil, too. But all writers should be aware that these things are not equally balanced. Women are the historic victim group. I happen to be a woman. All books should express due respect for women.
THINGS I'M NOT KEEN ON, MAY READ, BUT CAN'T PROMISE TO REVIEW WELL
* Product-supportive books. Some products are more loathsome than others but, much as I liked Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, one book about a fantastic high-tech car was enough.
* Faith in totalitarian government as a solution to anything
* Militant atheism, religion-bashing
* Gory stories, even if they're true war or crime stories
* Explicit sex scenes
* Abuse/overuse of the word "racism." If you believe it's justifiable to expand the definition of this word to mean everything that goes on in a society where some ethnic groups are worse off than others, and you're writing about that belief, you may use "racism" to describe things that involve no conscious acts of hate, but this will be explained to readers without much sympathy. If you use "racism" without an explanation it should be easy to identify acts of hate or prejudice. It is generally a good idea for writers to use words as the majority of readers do.
* Overuse of formerly unprintable words generally. I've heard them before, and one reason why I still dislike them is that using them keeps writers from expressing what they mean. Characters who use these words constantly are self-identifying as stupid, angry, obnoxious people. Writers should generally use the words they mean--though if it's necessary to describe damage to a sewer or septic system, it's all right to use the words the people looking at that damage used. That is what the writer means.
* Elitist bigotry. Writing about rich people is fine, writing about poor people is fine, but the assumption that the rich people are better should always be challenged.
* Other kinds of bigotry. It was all right for G.K. Chesterton to write detective stories showing how Father Brown knew that any deviation from Catholic doctrine was likely to have contributed to someone's decision to commit a crime, but it's stale for anyone else to try that.
* Egregious errors of fact. Anyone can decide to change a detail like a brand name, in a true story, and end up with a back seat in a 1978 Corvette, but before publishing you're supposed to fix these things.
* Macroevolutionism. There is no longer any excuse for covering up a shortage of facts about plant or animal essays with longwinded theoretical discussions of how they evolved. If you're writing about living things, write about what they are and what they do now.
* Political bigotry. If you're going to write about people's disagreements with you, do it with some intelligence, some respect for yourself if not for their opinions.
* Books, even if they're nonfiction and well researched, on banking, interest-based finance, insurance, gambling, marketing, salesmanship, bioengineering, or gender "transitioning." How accurate such books may be, my ethical sense does not allow me to know.
* Generally avoid ethnic stereotypes. The character of Oryx in Oryx and Crake was neither stale nor a stereotype when the book was written, but quickly became one--admittedly because she's so easy to like--so don't use Oryx as the model for a character unless you can think of a way to refresh the character beyond the stereotype. There is no real alternative to spending some time in a modern city, having some sort of adventure, and writing about your friends in a way that blurs their identities but presents their ethnicity and individuality the way they really were.
* I don't absolutely bar erotica, but everyone's tastes differ and what I find erotic is usually not what's classified as erotica. In both erotica and horror I'm impressed by a deft use of the "one telling detail" method. Well...after reading the book of Songs in the Bible, I maintain that the most romantic, or erotic, line in the Bible is still "Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days, for the love he had for her." So my reactions to books that pile on the details are likely to be tepid.
THINGS I LIKE TO READ
* Fresh facts. Tell me something I didn't know.
* Nature and outdoor settings.
* Things the commercial media don't like to handle.
* Things that oppose any or all components of U.N. Agenda 21, including the idea of the U.N. going beyond its charter so far as to have an agenda for any country's domestic policy.
* Characters who may be asexual, or may not, but readers never know for sure.
* Romance is fine, but just for variation's sake I like stories about women who have adventures with no noticeable "love interest," too.
* Vegans who, along with their vows not to eat animals, took vows not to be tiresome to humans either. Why pick a fight when you can rouse an appetite?
* Believable homeschool families.
* People who work from home, especially women.
* People who are seriously engaged with jobs other than writing. It's a pity, because I could write a few, but books about young writers are a bit of a cliche.
* Parents and children who like each other. Believably.
* Couples who are happily married, having sex-free adventures alone or together.
* Animals in believable, mutually respectful relationships with humans. It's funny when the animals solve the mystery faster than the human detectives do, and it's cozy when there's one passing reference to "the cat" or "a bird," but it's wonderful when a specific bird builds a nest near the window and the humans watch the bird and work around it all summer.
* True introverts, as distinct from traumatized extroverts, having fun and learning things when they're alone.
* Friends who do things together (not just "hanging out" and wasting time) and are loyal and/or helpful to one another.
* Intelligent, well educated (or self-taught) people who do blue-collar jobs.
* Middle-class Black Americans. Moesha was a little too conscious of being a role model, but did anybody not like Moesha?
* Believable hillbillies--like your family and neighbors, not the worst-case stories of poverty and degeneracy somebody told some social worker in 1942.
* Books about other countries that other people from those countries like and recommend. The primary readers of this web site are in and of the United States. People in the United States could stand to read a lot more about the rest of the world than most of us do.
* Books about any religious faith you, the writer, seriously believe and practice.
8. Since some book review communities specifically request "brutally honest" reviews, and since Goodreads' goal is to have a page for every book anyway, yes, I do publish some really rotten reviews. Not merely reviews that disagree with and upset a terribly sensitive young writer like Tanya Mills, either. I wrote a Vindictive Review that said a book was fun to read because, however dissatisfied you felt with where you were, this book would make you glad you weren't in the writer's town. I wrote a Rotten Review that said a book did contain some good ideas but all of those ideas were better handled in other books, and this particular book was about as wrongheaded as a book can be. But usually I do that when I happen to have acquired a copy of a book that's out of print, and the writer is dead. If I'm willing to sell the book I make fun of its faults in a snarky blog post that usually sells my copy to someone who won't be harmed by it. (Some buyers actually look for a book that's moved a reviewer to a flight of sarcastic wit.) If not I might or might not give it a 1-star review on Goodreads and ignore it otherwise.
I try to encourage living writers of new books. When in doubt, writers should consider the stars at Goodreads, Amazon, Library Thing, and Net Galley. They all use five-star systems, where:
5 stars = an excellent book, potentially a classic of world literature
4 stars = I enjoyed reading it
3 stars = some faults, but likely to be an enjoyable read for some people
2 stars = seriously flawed
1 star = a bad book
0 stars = I want my money back even if I didn't pay, I want the time back I spent reading this, I want some sort of eye treatment to blot out the memory of it
Please bear in mind that I wouldn't give all of Shakespeare's "books"--plays--5 stars.
There are writers--Laurie Halse Anderson comes to mind--who've given the world, in quick succession, books I gave 4, 5, 4, and 2 stars, so if you've trusted me with the newborn baby of your mind and I give it 2 stars, I will share the review with you but offer not to publish it. What Anderson did was to leave one particularly disastrous product-supportive line in one book. I still like her. I still follow her. I still think that line, allowed to stand, may have contributed to the loss of human lives. I think publishers owe it to themselves to make sure that, if a teenager is allowed to comment that a friend "needs Prozac and other drugs," that teenager should know how wrong she was to make that diagnosis before the end.
Then there are books--only The Turner Diaries comes to mind--where I've laid a book aside, looked at the author's picture, and growled, "I hope you are already dead!" (Turner and two friends meet a neighbor family in the park. The neighbors are unarmed. Turner and friends open fire, "but the old grandfather got away." Any reader who thinks these cowards are being presented as role models, as Timothy McVeigh reportedly thought, needs medical attention.) I think everyone knows how vile The Turner Diaries is, but yes, some books do deserve Goodreads reviews that say "This book is disgusting. It owes Goodreads a few stars to reach zero. It belongs on the list of books libraries should display to show that they oppose censorship, but it deserves to be the one of those books nobody reads."
If I observed that your characters are miserable because they're taking the wrong approach to Romantic Love, but I gave you 4 stars for expressing their misery well, I consider that an encouraging review. I can't be responsible for hurt feelings.
Generally, my goal is to encourage living writers, so reviews published other than on Goodreads will get either 3, 4, or 5 stars.
Generally, I'll ask the writer if person wants me to publish a 3-star review.
9. If a book was professionally edited by its author, I'm cool with that, but the author/editor needs to have done a good job.
10. So, if you want a brutally honest review of a book for which the brutal truth is that I think a lot of people ought to like it, send your name as it appears on the book, e-mail address, and a copy of either the book, the final draft, or the galleys, to the public e-mail address, currently PriscillaKing2020@outlook.com. (Please specify whether it's the book or the draft/galleys. I don't quibble about spelling mistakes in drafts, and I'm willing to help proofread galleys.) Within a few days after e-mail confirmation that it came through, you can watch the title move up the Reading List Page. When it reaches the top, you'll be reviewed.
Inspired by Barb Taub's example, I'm posting these guidelines with a link to https://www.theindieview.com/indie-reviewers/ .
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