On the Business of Book Reviews: Insights from Ross Rojek of City Book Review

In this eye-opening episode of Talking Book Publishing, hosts Kathleen and Adanna sit down with Ross Rojek, editor and publisher of City Book Review, to explore the inner workings of the book review industry. Ross shares the journey of launching City Book Review in Sacramento in 2008 and evolving it into a network of review sites across eight U.S. cities, plus a special platform for young reviewers, Kids Book Buzz. With candor and humor, he explains the real work behind publishing honest book reviews, from managing hundreds of reviewers to handling over 1,500 book submissions a month.

Listeners will gain a behind-the-scenes look at the review selection process, the distinction between editorial and reader reviews, and why professional presentation is essential. Ross also offers invaluable advice to authors—especially indie and self-published ones—about treating their writing as a business. From marketing tips to understanding what makes a book stand out to reviewers and libraries, this episode is packed with practical insights for anyone in the literary world.

We’d like to hear from you. If you have topics or speakers you’d like us to interview, please email us at podcast@talkingbookpublishing.today and join the conversation in the comments on our Instagram @writerspubsnet.

Transcript

00:00:04 SPEAKER_01
Hello, everyone, and welcome to this episode of Talking Book Publishing. I'm Kathleen Kaiser, your host, along with my co -host, Adanna Moriarty. And today we have the editor and publisher of City Book Reviews, which is a series of book review publications and websites across the country in different cities. I believe they started in San Francisco. That's where I first found them, was in San Francisco. But they are really wonderful to work with. They give really honest reviews. And I thought, we haven't had a reviewer on this show. So I've invited Ross Rojek, who is the editor and publisher. Welcome.

00:00:50 SPEAKER_00
Welcome. Thanks for letting me talk about this stuff. Yeah.

00:00:53 SPEAKER_01
Well, I find it always interesting. Because reviews are very important, and I think especially editorial reviews. And you have now branched out, so tell us a little bit about Citibook Reviews before we start.

00:01:09 SPEAKER_00
Okay, so we actually started in Sacramento in 2008. And we were actually a print publication at the time. I want to say 24 pages, might have been 16, I forget.

00:01:22 SPEAKER_00
And we were... Trying to create a model for print book reviews. It was still early enough that I thought it could work. It ended up not staying in print. I think we did about two years. By the time you found us, we'd been distributing Sacramento Book Review up in the Bay Area. And the bookstores there complained because they didn't want to have a Sacramento publication out. So we started San Francisco Book Review at that point. And then we started publishing every other month. One month would be Sacramento. One month would be San Francisco. I want to say after about three years, we just basically ran out of money to pay for printing. There wasn't enough local ads. There wasn't enough publisher support. So we just moved to online only. But as we kind of continued that, we licensed Portland first. So I was one of our reviewers, wanted to do it herself there. And so she got going. She lasted like four or five years publishing it there. We did, we had, I want to say we've had about six licensees over the years. Almost all of them have failed. I think most of them don't get that it is a real job. It is not a, I get free books and I get to write about them. It is a, you get a lot of books. You need to manage a hundred reviewers. You need to. You need to have a full -time person receiving books, sending out books, all of those things. So over the years, we kind of collected some of those sites back. That was Portland, Tulsa, San Diego. We had people asking us about doing something in Seattle. And so what we've done is each of the sites has kind of its own local model. Last month when Tom Robbins and David Lynch both died, I wrote an article about how important Washington State was to both those places for the Seattle paper, our Seattle publication. So we try and keep that local. Authors get promoted in their local version. So if you're a San Francisco or Northern California author, you go to San Francisco Book Review, LA authors in LA, that sort of thing. So I think we're pretty happy with where we're at. We have a total of eight publications, eight sites. in eight different cities, and then one called Kids Book Buzz, that is all kids under the age of 18 doing book reviews. What?

00:03:54 SPEAKER_01
When did you start that one?

00:03:57 SPEAKER_00
That was early on. That had to have been about 2009, 2010. Oh. And it was started because a bunch of our reviewers wanted to get books for their kids. They started asking if we wanted their kids to review books. And I think the majority of our kid reviewers are almost all homeschoolers. We kind of got into that market. And so they just kind of, you know, we'd have one family with four kids reviewing books who'd say, hey, we have this friend who's got kids that like to do it. And they kind of grew from there. And over, let's call it 15 years, we've had kids grow from kids' book buzz. into adult reviews and are still reviewing for us 10 plus years later.

00:04:45 SPEAKER_03
That's so cool. So is the kid one, I mean, is it like little kids or does it span like into YA?

00:04:51 SPEAKER_00
It goes up, it does the whole thing up through into YA. The littler kids are, they're helped by their parents. So you're not getting a four -year -old to write it, but you're getting a four -year -old's review of the book as the parents. Kind of, what did you like about the book? What did you think of the characters? That sort of thing. So we get the reviews that way. I'd say the bulk of the reviewer, kid reviewers, are start at tweens and work their way up.

00:05:20 SPEAKER_01
You're sort of building your own catalog of reviewers that just stay with you.

00:05:25 SPEAKER_00
And they get used to having free books and they turn 18 and they start looking at the adult list and they're like, yeah, there's this stuff here I want to review too.

00:05:35 SPEAKER_01
So let's talk about, actually, as a reviewer, do you have a format that they need to judge things on? Or how do you have them put the reviews together? Is there any sort of an outline of what you expect in a review?

00:05:56 SPEAKER_00
Yeah. Our house style is first paragraph should just be summary. No spoilers, anything else like that, but a good enough summary that you can tell what the book's about and whether or not you're interested in it. The second paragraph should be your thoughts on it, writing styles, problems with the book, things you like, characters, et cetera. Not everybody does that, but that's kind of my starting point is here's how that works. Our star count is, I think, about standard with most people. You know, a five is a book you would keep and you'd want to share with friends. Four is a book you enjoyed reading and you'd probably put on your shelf. The three is it's not a bad book if you like this sort of thing. A one star is this book will probably give you cancer.

00:06:49 SPEAKER_00
And I mean that literally. I think that is what our actual one star comment says in our welcome packages. A one star means this book will give you cancer.

00:07:01 SPEAKER_03
That's hilarious. I want to know, like, you know, kind of more origin of what made you decide that you wanted to create, you know, this magazine, I mean, book reviews, like a publication monthly, like what was that motivation?

00:07:22 SPEAKER_00
Back in 2008, I was unemployed. I liked reading. I've been a reader. My entire life, most of my memories revolve around books in one way or another. I can always tell kind of what era my life was based on what books I was reading. There wasn't anything really like it. I'd never seen anything like it. I had kind of a broad range of interests as far as books go, which means I'm buying everything from mass market science fiction through to $45. you know, history books. And I realized, this is going to sound a little bit crass, but I realized right around there that there was this entire pool of professional people whose job it was to send free books out to readers. And I was like, I could get a free book. And so I kind of built this thing up with a friend who ended up flaking on me about six months into it, right before we were getting ready to print. couldn't do it. And so that's where Heidi and I got together and made that work. But I just started requesting books. I had this feel I wanted to do this thing. I started requesting books. I still remember the first package of books I got was from Knopf. Nicholas was the director or vice president at the time. And I get this nice package of like four arcs and a note saying, I really appreciate this. Good luck. This is a shitty economy to try this in. And then a couple weeks later, I get a $200 Michelangelo book from Tasha. And that was at the point I'm like, they're interested in something like this. So that kind of just is where we started. I ended up with the first issue or two. I was the only reviewer. And by reviewer, I mean I did not read every book. I just basically tried to skim them and fill up 16 pages of print publication. But once we got the first publication out, we started having people call us or write to us going, hey, I'd like to read books too. And so then we started with this mostly local Sacramento reviewers, which then kind of expanded as they're like telling their friends, hey, there's this place you can go get free books if you're willing to write a review. And it's kind of, you know, our reviewers come and go. We get flaky ones who are all excited, request eight books, and then realize that they actually have to do work and then disappear on us. We have people that do two reviews every month for 16 years now. I mean, like solidly people that we just every month that do, you know, one or two reviews. But that's where it started. I needed a job that seemed to work, and it's turned out into a career.

00:10:18 SPEAKER_03
So, I mean, and now today, those people get paid for their reviews. Is that... It's a combination of... It's getting free books.

00:10:25 SPEAKER_00
combination of... It's getting free books. It's a paid and free books if we're not getting paid. About a year into it, maybe six months into it, my thought had always been, I'm not going to do books that are more than like 90 days old. Because once you do that, then everything is available. And I had some guy that really, really wanted me to review his book. And it was like two years old. And he said something along the lines of, well, can I pay you to do it? And I was like, sure. How about a hundred bucks? And he paid me to review his book. I reviewed his book. And, you know, all of a sudden we had a new income stream. So what we do with our sponsor reviews is our reviewers get paid a percentage of what we get paid. But other than that, no, it's the usual, we send you a book, you get us a review, you keep the book, trade -off.

00:11:17 SPEAKER_01
So you have major publishers who submit books, which your reviewers select from or you send out to have reviewed. And then you have the pay model, because that's what I've done using that form. I've really liked what was written. And the thing is, I think I was telling you before we started recording, though, sometimes there was one review that had all the characters' names wrong and everything. And I was like, oh, my God. And I had the client look at it and make sure we got everything correct. We sent it back to you, and you guys just took care of it perfectly. Which is sometimes it's a little more difficult to get things straightened out with some review organizations. And I like that about what you did because you wanted it right.

00:12:11 SPEAKER_00
We get in, I want to say, 1 ,500 plus books a month. And it's from everybody. We get University Press through to, like I said, Knopf sends me probably two -thirds of what they release every month. And then on the other end of it, we have 100 and 120 reviewers. And so they're all picking the books they want. They're reviewing them. They're sending it in. But there is no physical way other than having a job, somebody whose full -time job it is, is to read every book to make sure that the reviewer got it correct. Right. So that's why we count on the publicist to tell us, you know, if you're a publicist, you send us a book. our database will automatically tell you that the book's been reviewed and here's a link to it, whatever else, so that we can get that feedback. And that's how we find the reviewers that are lazy. I had one publicist say, I really love this review, but it's word for word what I put in the press pack that I sent with the book. And I'm like, okay, what a less reviewer then. We're now currently playing whack -a -mole with AI. We've had some publishers complain that they think a book has been reviewed by AI. I've got a couple of websites I use to test. You know, it's going to be one of those things. Somebody will have a deadline. They'll be lazy. They'll try and take a shortcut. We try and catch them. And so when mistakes are made, yeah, I mean, we just have to fix what's there. I think the thing that separates us out, you're kind of getting to this right now, is there are a lot of... paid book review outlets now, most of whom only do paid book reviews. That is their model. I won't mention any, but you could kind of easily tell whether or not this is that sort of outlet or not. And it's just straight up vanity reviews. They're all five -star. They're all going to be positive because their model is we only make money when you send us books. Whereas in our case, we have other forms of income. You know, if you send us a book and I give it to a reviewer and the viewer doesn't like it, it comes back two stars, but the review is good. I'm going to back up my reviewer and just say, hey, look, I'm really sorry, but, you know, there's issues with your book. Here's what my reviewer said. Or, you know, occasionally we get to the angry author stage, which is my stage, you know, and I'll have to read their book and I'll go, you know what? I agree with it. It needs another round of editing. Your premise sucks. Whatever else, right?

00:14:41 SPEAKER_01
with it.

00:14:47 SPEAKER_00
But our reviewers are under no obligation to put out a positive review. And if you've filled out the form, you know that's one of the checkboxes that says, I know I'm not going to get a guarantee positive review. And so I think the only places that are like that are us, Kirkus, and Forward. I don't know of anybody else that is not all of their income stream coming off of those paid reviews.

00:15:16 SPEAKER_01
Well, Book Life, which is Publishers Weekly.

00:15:20 SPEAKER_00
Yes. Now, have they moved to actually doing every book, or is it still the pay 50 bucks and maybe we'll review your book?

00:15:29 SPEAKER_01
I don't know. All of the books I've submitted to them, they've reviewed. Okay.

00:15:34 SPEAKER_01
And actually, I've gotten two editors' picks out of it. But we're kind of selective on who we take as clients, too. you know, done a filtering job. The one thing I like about them is that they put at the bottom, they have the reviewer score, the editing, the content, the cover, the marketing materials that came with it. They give you a little summary of what they think of what it was, which is always helpful. And it feels good when you get an A and when you get a B, it doesn't feel as good.

00:16:09 SPEAKER_03
you get

00:16:12 SPEAKER_03
I love getting there. Their reviews back because we always get an A on our marketing material.

00:16:20 SPEAKER_01
It's just like publicists get little recognition. So it's always nice to see somebody gave me an A on something.

00:16:28 SPEAKER_00
I could tell you that in our office, when a publicist goes above and beyond the packaging or something. Whoever is doing the, you know, the mail desk work has a tendency to run into the office and go check out this, you know, and we've kept things that, that people have sent when it is a spectacularly well done package, you know, kind of as a sample for when, because part of what I also do is I work, I do some of what you guys do. I work with authors less on the publicity side and more on the marketing side or, you know, how to. how to juice up your book, how, you know, from how do you create a one or a plus content on Amazon to how do you outreach to bloggers to, you know, social media, et cetera. And so those are some of those things. If, you know, if you want to do a, you know, a book outreach package, let me show you what you can do. That's going to make somebody pay attention when they open the box. And so when you guys do those, we pay attention.

00:17:33 SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Well, if you don't care about the product and you present it as if it's something that's worthy, why would anybody pay any attention to it? It's just another book in a stack.

00:17:46 SPEAKER_00
And then on the other end of it too, our reviewers don't see that. Our reviewers just get a spreadsheet. But what will happen is that the desk clerk or Julie who's handling most of that, might end up saying, hey, I know who's going to want this book based on the fact that it's an exciting package. And I think that, you know, I have a reviewer in mind. And then we'll recommend it to a reviewer, you know, if we know somebody's coming through with that. But, you know, I mean, definitely from our point of view, the better the package, the more attention you're going to get, you know, especially when we're doing, you know, 30 packages in a day. If one of those stands out, that's what somebody's going to remember.

00:18:31 SPEAKER_01
Do you find they want to get the hard copy of a book or the e -book?

00:18:36 SPEAKER_00
We have had so many problems with the e -book that we've just given up. It's a hard system advantage, especially when they're using NetGalley. And now we have to make sure that the reviewers registered there. Everything else that other than sponsored reviews, we pretty much don't do e -books at all unless it's something that... I know somebody wants, somebody's requested, or that I want, and that's the format I want it in.

00:19:03 SPEAKER_03
That's good. So you said you guys get about 1 ,500 books a month? Yeah. Do you review all of those? I mean, what does that process look like? I mean, that's a lot of books, even to send out. It is a lot of books,

00:19:16 SPEAKER_00
is a lot of books, yes.

00:19:18 SPEAKER_03
yes. Just to intake and send out, that's like a full -time job. So, I mean, do you review every single book that comes in?

00:19:25 SPEAKER_00
Now, we probably review about 300 books a month. So there's a lot of leftover.

00:19:33 SPEAKER_03
Yeah, what happens to the other 1 ,200?

00:19:33 SPEAKER_00
happens to the other 1 ,200? And then out of that too, I'll tell everybody up front, if you're going to send an ARC, only send one. But because people are used to sending us two finals, they'll send us two ARCs. And now I've got two of something that I need at most one of. Let me just say that the county jail really likes us.

00:19:58 SPEAKER_03
So what does the filtering process look like? I mean, if you take 300 of the 1500, is it, is it what their media packages look like?

00:20:09 SPEAKER_00
I would say that 80 to 90 % of all the choices are made by the reviewer. So we provide, we provide them a spreadsheet twice a month that says, here's all the books that are available, broken out by genre. And they go through there and pick what they want. And that's fundamentally where most of those 300 go. Sponsor reviews either get assigned or we have another list of people that we trust for those. And we'll say, hey, here's five books that need to get reviewed that are on the paid list this month. And people pick those. The rest of them just kind of fall by the wayside. We started about, I want to say two years ago, we started doing roundups just to stop wasting so many books. So that's also something that gets flagged kind of as they're coming through is we might say, hey, let's use this one. Let's do a poetry roundup for April for three different websites. So there goes 15 books that we can pull off the shelf and put into a roundup. And we pay people for that too. That's basically $25 to do a summary and an intro paragraph for five books. But that lets us use some more books. There's less waste. the publishers who send us so many books that I don't want them to feel like, you know, we're just a black hole of accepting books and nothing ever comes back out again. Every so often I'll run the numbers and I'll say, okay, you know, are we having a problem with any one publisher that's sending books in and they're getting canceled more often? A lot of it is just packages. I mean, we've got people that were on their list, you know, and for 16 years I've told people, don't send me board books. And every month we get board books from three or four different places that, you know, my grandkids are happy, but there's nothing I can do with board books.

00:22:02 SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Just in thinking about it, so you set a spreadsheet out. What about the cover? Because that's what attracts most buyers to a book. Is that something people see before they select to review? Most of our reviewers,

00:22:19 SPEAKER_00
of our reviewers, yeah. Title author, ISBN, probably like two other pieces of data. So a lot of them go look the books up. So I know they're looking up to see what the book looks like. They're reading the description of the book because we don't give them that. So as they're picking, they're doing their own research on what we have too. Different reviewers have their own specialty. I've got one guy that only does music books. So if we've got... two or three music books, he's going to pick up one or two of them to do. And that's, you know, that's his thing. We've got other people that are kind of like me, they've got a wide range. So he might be asking for a fiction book, might be asking for something, you know, nonfiction, and then like three anthologies. It's, I can, there are times when I can guess who's going to pick a book based on just as it's coming in. There are times when I can guess that I will have more than one person requesting that book and who I'm going to want to give it to. Other times I'm like, who's going to pick up this book? And then I'm like, somebody takes it. And to that extent, I think that's kind of where we get into that whole self -published indie book area is we don't treat them different. They're on the list with everybody else. So if you are a self -published mystery writer, And I've got a Grisham book coming out. You're on the same list as Grisham for a reviewer. We're not going to separate those things out. And so I think we do a lot of, we do more indie and self -published book reviews for free than we do for paid. And that's just because we treat them equally.

00:24:07 SPEAKER_03
I'm so fascinated by this process. And it's probably not like. what we really want to dive super deep into on the podcast, but how do you make the database? Like, do you scan the barcodes? I mean,

00:24:21 SPEAKER_00
yeah, we, we have, it is, we built this thing over 16 years. We, I interesting side note. So kids book buzz we created back in like, I want to say 2009 and my wife and I, We were using iPhones at the time. We had her small child. And so at some point, she's like, hey, why don't we do an app for the kids' book buzz so that parents can look and see what books are out for kids or they can hand their phone to their kid and say, hey, pick out a book. We'll go find it for you, right? So I ended up going down this rabbit hole that year on how to make a smartphone app. And so I found a platform. We did it. And then as I did that, it turns out we were also living near Livermore Wine Country in Northern California, and there was a bunch of wineries. And so I used the same platform to make this little wine app. There's a point to all this. And so I had my own little guide to the 45 wineries in Livermore so I could know where they were when we were driving around. Otherwise, it was complicated. That led to one of the wineries in Livermore saying, hey, can you put this out for real and publish it and we'll pay you? And so we ended up with an app that was a client app. So now we're getting paid to get people to go drink wine, which then led to another app and another app and another app. So we have this app business on the side that came from Kids Book Buzz because of this. And it was all because the database to do the... The books let me convert that from that to an app database simply.

00:26:06 SPEAKER_00
Otherwise, it would have been a pain in the ass. So we have a full -time programmer that works for us. Still does. He's been with us for more than 10 years. And so every so often, he'll come along and clean something up. So now what happens is that your book comes in. It goes to the receiving table. We scan it into a platform that he created that then goes off and checks. Amazon for title, genre, author, price,

00:26:34 SPEAKER_00
like six other things, puts it all into our spreadsheet. And then we then convert that into our, then it moves to our database that then they fill in other information. That's where they'll put it, the publicist information and everything else. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's a quick scan to get it started. And then the harder part is how much information the publicists give us. So if you send in a sell sheet with us, then we have your name, we have your address, or you have your email address, other things we need about it. If we just get a book in the mail with no contact information, that goes in a pile where it's like, okay, at some point we'll have to look it up. Do we know who the publicist is based on the imprint? Then we can do something. You know, like certain ones like Doubleday has a generic email address. So all the Doubleday books just get that one unless we get a sell sheet. But yeah, the database has grown. I want to say there's probably 80 or 90 fields in it now. You know, it is the hub for everything that we do so that I can go in and I can say, hey, show me, you know, every biography that we've received that doesn't have a reviewer that is, you know, less than 300 pages. And, you know, being published in April. And now I get a list of like 10 books that I can then turn around and say, okay, let's do a, you know, a biography roundup using five of these books. And I can flag them for that, assign it to a reviewer. Reviewer can log in, see what's assigned to them, do the review, turn it back in again.

00:28:08 SPEAKER_01
I like the idea of the roundups because at least books get mentioned then.

00:28:13 SPEAKER_00
Bingo. Yeah. Yeah. And that was something I just came because about a year or two ago, the amount of books we had coming in just like jumped again. We went from like a thousand a month to 1500. And I just felt bad that so many books, good books too, are being left on the side. And so we just started that so that we could just kind of pull books. So like, okay, if nobody's going to review this, we'll do something with it. And so sometimes it's me. Sometimes it's one of the staffers. Christy does some, Julie does some. Sometimes we'll pay somebody to do one, but it just lets us use more books, more content, which then, you know, kind of keeps the websites a little bit different. So it's not just this giant scrolling list of all the books, but okay, now we have an article we have, you know, it's Mother's Day. Here's five books from Mother's Day or something, whatever we can kind of come up with a hook on.

00:29:04 SPEAKER_01
That makes it much more interesting for the readers that are looking at the website and trying to make some selections. Right.

00:29:11 SPEAKER_00
You know, and I mean, yeah, if you're, you know, if you're into mysteries, instead of having to look at every mystery review, here's five. Here's a quick hit on five new books that just came out.

00:29:22 SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Now, that was one thing. Do you, you said you look stuff up on Amazon, but if the book hasn't been published yet, it's going to come out in six months. It won't be on Amazon if it's specifically.

00:29:35 SPEAKER_00
Yeah. And then that stuff we fill in by hand. Yeah. So like, and like all the arcs don't have a barcode. Yeah. So, you know, those are just, we have to, you know, you just go into the database directly at that point. But if somebody is sending us finals, that's, that's where we start. Yeah. You know what? In fact, that's right. Hang on. We don't use Amazon anymore. We ended up overloading their API because we don't ever give them links back. We've moved to something called title link that is owned by book manager. which is a point of sale system out of Canada. We made that change, I want to say a year and a half, two years ago. Yeah, that was about that. Yeah. You were mentioning using the sell sheets.

00:30:21 SPEAKER_01
were mentioning using the sell sheets. What information, because a lot of people, they call it media kit or a sell sheet, something like that. What information is most important for you to have on that? What was this name and email address?

00:30:33 SPEAKER_00
What was this name and email address? Or the author's name and email address?

00:30:37 SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but then what about there's a description of the book about the author, ISBNs, page counts?

00:30:45 SPEAKER_00
Some of that will help with the database stuff. But for us, almost none of it matters. We just need the contact information. And you'll be shocked at how many people send us a book with no contact information. Just, here's my book. But the sell sheets then go to the authors or go to the reviewers. They're included with the book so that they have something to work with from there. And I do know that that's helpful. Sometimes it'll flag something, especially if there's like a partial interview that somebody has included in there that might flag that we want to do an interview with that author. So they are looked at, but we don't do much with them other than looking for contact information or the information we need to fill out the database. So, but on the reviewer end, they get them. how much do they use of it is kind of, you know, up to the different reviewers. But if I say any one thing out of here that anybody takes to heart is if you're sending a book to a reviewer or a review outlet or anything, make sure your name and your phone number and your email address are included somewhere. Easy to find. Definitely.

00:32:01 SPEAKER_01
Go ahead, AAdanna.

00:32:03 SPEAKER_03
Oh, I, I have so many questions. I don't even know where to begin.

00:32:11 SPEAKER_00
I've been doing this 16 years. I have so many questions.

00:32:13 SPEAKER_03
Yeah. I just like, I mean, it's such an important part of the process, right. For people to get their books reviewed. Like, you know, I mean, and some places don't take poetry because, you know, poetry is so selective. I mean, like I'm a poet, we sent my book out for review and got none back. Right. We didn't get any back because the free outlet we sent it to was like, we don't take poetry. So, I mean,

00:32:35 SPEAKER_02
the free

00:32:40 SPEAKER_03
mean, what, is there any genres you don't do? Or, I mean, what do you do with. We do almost everything. We have poetry,

00:32:48 SPEAKER_00
We have poetry, you know, and I've got a couple of poets that do those reviews. You know, I think what we have found in our kind of collection is, is it's, it's, we have people who are, who are passionate about different subjects. And would be buying these books anyway. So, you know, there's that aspect of, you know, they're getting their free book, they're reviewing it, you know, author, you know, they would, maybe they would have bought the book if we hadn't sent it to them for free. But when we first started this,

00:33:20 SPEAKER_00
we first started this, I wanted to make it kind of this opener, open -ended thing because not everybody is interested in the books that I'm interested in. So if I did a book review that was just books I was interested in, 90 % of the book reading public wouldn't care. I mean, I don't do romance. There are a ton of romance readers. In fact, there are so many romance readers that we are getting ready to launch a romance review website by itself. So that's kind of the original thought process is we don't limit to anything. And occasionally we'll get a book in. I've got some company now that is sending me these business, almost textbook -like things,

00:34:06 SPEAKER_00
textbook -like things, and I've asked them not to because nobody's going to review them and they keep sending me boxes of them. So there is a filtering process. I will look at a book and I'm like, nobody's ever going to want this and just won't put it in the database, board books, et cetera. But if you sent in a poetry book, I'm not going to try and judge your poetry based on Anything other than the fact of, okay, this is the shittiest cover I've ever seen. I'm not even going to bother putting it in because there was no effort made. And that doesn't happen a lot either, but it does happen. There are people who have done the least amount of work possible to get a book into print. And both Tyndall and IngramSpark make it easy. So if anybody can publish a book, everybody will. But if you've made an attempt, if the cover looks professional, it has a barcode, it has an ISBN, all of those things, then we're going to treat you like a real author or publisher and see if anybody wants to do it.

00:35:09 SPEAKER_00
publisher and see if anybody wants to do it. That's our process.

00:35:16 SPEAKER_03
So, I mean, when you get books, I mean, part of the filtering process is like, you know, do they look professional? Like they're not just. you know, made in somebody's garage and sent to you stapled together. I mean, that is that part. Well, I asked Kathleen and I have this conversation often about, you know, cover editing, blah, blah, blah, and how important they are, you know, even as the self published, like, you know, you can, you can step back and take some time. You don't just have to be like, I have a book, you know, and send it to the world.

00:35:56 SPEAKER_00
Yep. And we get those books. We get some weird stuff. I don't do a lot of the openings, but I get to see the stuff that's rejected.

00:36:09 SPEAKER_00
And we don't reject a lot. Sometimes it's like a very, very narrow memoir that the only person who's going to be interested in is that person's family. That kind of thing we might reject. But overall, I mean, we accept probably 95%, 99 % of everything that is sent to us and give it at least a month or two on the list to see if somebody does want it.

00:36:39 SPEAKER_01
That sounds fair.

00:36:41 SPEAKER_00
Yeah. And then, you know, I mean, if somebody really wants to review, they can pay us for one. And I mean, that's become, I think that part of the business is,

00:36:55 SPEAKER_00
is the harder part. There's that twofold section of what do you need reviews from? You need as many Amazon reviews as you can if you're selling there because that triggers the algorithm into knowing what other people are liking your book that gets more people to buy it, that sort of thing. And that's the practical reader review. On the other end of it, if you don't have An editorial review, the difference in between those two things, bookstores aren't going to pay attention to you. I mean, they might if you are a local and they know you and you shop there and they're like, yeah, we'll take two copies of your book on consignment and put them on the shelf. But having San Francisco Book Review or Kirkus or whatever other.

00:37:41 SPEAKER_00
Francisco Book Review or Kirkus or whatever other. A publication that is a publication designed to review things on a professional level on your Amazon page, on your marketing materials, on your website, those all things all help. It's just different. And so when I get somebody who's asking, hey, if I buy this review, how many of my books are you going to sell? I'm like, I don't know. What are you going to do with my review? You know, how are you going to use that review to sell more books? Not, okay, it's on our website. We have a link and you can, you know, is anybody going to buy it from there? Maybe. I don't know.

00:38:13 SPEAKER_04
know, how

00:38:23 SPEAKER_00
You know, we get all of our links back to bookshop .org. And so we do an affiliate link. We get a little bit of money from bookshop .org on a regular basis. You know, but we're not moving books like Amazon does. But on the other end of it. A good review is going to get more bookstores interested or will lead to a better review from a better publication or a podcast or TV appearance or those things. And I think a lot of authors think they're the same thing. An editorial review and a reader review on Amazon are equivalent one -to -one, and they're not. They're two completely different things.

00:39:07 SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that's in the marketing of the book. You have to have the editorial reviews for the bookstores and libraries to look at you when they get catalogs or different things that come out from Ingram and that. They look at the editorial reviews. They don't care what Amazon readers said. They want to see what professionals say about the book.

00:39:31 SPEAKER_03
They look good on your one sheet when you send out for radio and podcast interviews and all kinds of stuff. Not just Joe Schmo that read my book and gave me a review, but this is an actual business organization that has a standard. Yep.

00:39:52 SPEAKER_00
Blurb on your back cover. Yeah. Those things are different. You guys do it on your end. I mean, I deal with, I get a lot of authors who have, they wrote the book first and now they discovered that it's not selling as soon as they upload it to Amazon. And now they want the quick fix. And so I oftentimes end up dealing with those people who don't even understand, you know, what their discount structure is at Ingram on whether or not a bookstore wants to get it or not, you know? And so this learning curve for, mostly self -published authors, is I wrote the book. Now what do I do with it as opposed to I want to write a book. I need to have a plan.

00:40:38 SPEAKER_01
Well, it's understanding the business of publishing. This isn't a hobby. This is a business. This is an industry. And I think we find that regularly with some of the questions that come from webinars or different things or people contacting us. Both AAdanna and I are part of the Writers and Publishers Network, which is a literary nonprofit. It's a national. And people go, well, I've got the book up on Amazon now for six months and I'm not getting anything. And I said, well, what did you do to market it? Dead silence. And it's like, well, I got it on Amazon. That's not marketing. You published it.

00:41:18 SPEAKER_03
And I've started telling people, I mean, you're not even a needle in a haystack on Amazon. You're a piece of hay in a haystack on Amazon. Like, I mean, you know, when you look at the volume of books that Amazon sells in a year, like, I mean, people aren't just going to come across you on Amazon, like without work.

00:41:40 SPEAKER_01
Well, they won't come across you if you haven't done anything to get the algorithms to have them come across you.

00:41:47 SPEAKER_03
That's what I mean without work. I mean, you have to, you know, you have to put some effort in there and, you know, probably run ads. I mean, if you're hoping that people are just going to find you. I mean, I think that authors have this, you know, we love our books, the ones that we've written, like they're a part of us. We love them. And we think like everybody's going to find it because we. You know, I mean, there's like a, an idealistic vision of I'm a published author, right? Like I published this book and everybody's going to want to read it and everybody's just going to find it. And, you know, on happenstance and that's not a reality at all.

00:42:27 SPEAKER_00
And yeah. And like I said, I mean, I, I finally took, I mean, Kathleen, you've probably seen the, the, what I do, the emails to the people on our list. I ended up creating a package called I Need Help. And it is literally me taking their book. And it's about a 40 -page report when I'm done, which is everything from make your Amazon page better, make your Amazon author page better, make your website better. Here's all the things. Here's eight ideas for blogs to do that will get you some Google traffic. Here's bloggers, all of those things. But what I find funny is the people that buy it are the ones who are like, yeah, I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm like, okay, here you go. We'll start there. And then they're like, oh, this is a list of things. I can do these things. It just never occurred to them that they needed to do them. Right.

00:43:29 SPEAKER_01
But they don't know. They don't know the business. They haven't researched it. I say they've kept their author hat on and didn't put on. their book marketer hat, you know, because that is, even when you're with a traditional house anymore, unless you're a well -known author, they hardly do anything for you. They don't even get trade reviews half the time. Because we have clients with major houses, no trade reviews ever come. Yeah.

00:43:54 SPEAKER_00
I have, I know that he won't mind me saying his name, but John Land has been one of our clients for a very, very long time. And he just gave me a nice... I did the I Need Help thing for him and his co -author that did a nonfiction book about being a prosecutor in New York City. But he has gotten reviews for his books up front early before his publicists start on it, just so he has something to start with. He hands it to the publicist and says, here's the first review. And I mean, he's... 10 plus years of this, you know, it's always nice to see him come along. He only buys one, but he gets, but I mean, but it, he is at a major house. He has multiple New York times bestsellers. And that's still, he sees it as, as part of the job is get that first review in, get it in quick, get it in early. And now you have something everybody else kind of hook off of from there. And, and he's with Macmillan. He's making a permanent living selling books for a living. And at the same time, he'll come to us because he needs that first review. And that first review is kind of what sets the tone for everything else.

00:45:19 SPEAKER_01
I think it's really good that way because if you're sending out like a sell sheet or like when we go out to podcasters and stuff, they look at that. They want to know. And then we give them links on the client's website. We have them do several podcasts before people we know who are right for their genre and then send it out and start pumping, trying to get the podcast interviews because they want to know, oh, well, who else has liked it? Or like for podcasts, how do you sound on the air? Right. Yep.

00:45:52 SPEAKER_03
I think my biggest pushback from, I'm a web designer. I don't know. I mean. Our audience knows that. Ross probably doesn't. So, I mean, my biggest pushback from clients, like, you know, when I first meet them and we start talking is that they don't want to do any of this because they want to be writing the next book. And I'm like, what's the point of the next book if you don't give this book a chance? I mean, you know, you have to be able to. switch back and forth from that creative to the business side, or it really is just a hobby. And why are you spending money on anything?

00:46:28 SPEAKER_00
Or you hire somebody to do it, but somebody's got to do the work. Right.

00:46:34 SPEAKER_03
Most people don't want to hire someone before they've tested the waters on if they can sell their book. I mean, most. Some people. Yeah,

00:46:43 SPEAKER_01
but that's so backwards. That's so backwards.

00:46:47 SPEAKER_03
It's the number one pushback that I get. It's always like, you know, why do I need this? Why should I spend the money? And, you know, how does it change whatever I'm doing? And those are always the questions that I have to answer. And I'm sure Kathleen does too. Like, you know, what are you going to do for me? And it's amazing to me because even things like reviews, like, you know, getting that early review. is so important. A, it tells you if you need to go back and edit. Most of the time, yeah. Especially for self -published people. I mean, how many books do you get that you're like, ooh, this could be edited more?

00:47:33 SPEAKER_00
A lot. And that's oftentimes the thing that gets the pushback from authors is, well, I did edit it or I paid my sister to edit it or fill in the blank.

00:47:46 SPEAKER_00
You know, and sometimes an author is correct that one of our reviewers screwed something up. I'll take that hit, you know, have somebody else review a book or we'll take it, you know, whatever else. But most of the time, you know, if there's a problem with the book, it's a problem with the book. Yeah.

00:48:04 SPEAKER_01
And that's usually it. I met some people at an event over the weekend and they said, oh, one of our clients that I've had now for. 12 years and I've gotten all five of his books and they said, Oh, we edited that one. And I said, yeah. And we had to have it reedited because you don't use the Chicago manual of style. And they go, what's that?

00:48:29 SPEAKER_01
I was like, I, they said, well, give us an example. I said, Oxford comma. They didn't know what that was, you know? And it's like, okay.

00:48:40 SPEAKER_00
Yeah. I am. I am starting a press of my own bringing – I found that there are California history books that are not easily available or have been done by – I don't even want to say AI.

00:48:58 SPEAKER_00
don't even want to say AI. Old scanned versions of books printed in the early 1900s, late 1800s that are printed that way still using fonts from that era, et cetera, bad covers, et cetera. that need to come back out. And so I'm starting that process. So all these things we're talking about, I'm starting to have to deal with from the other side of that now. And it's interesting doing it myself now. And so I know all the hurdles, paying for a cover and not doing it yourself in Canva costs money. Yeah. But the difference between what you get out of Canva and what you get when you pay a professional book editor or book designer is night and day. Yeah. You know, paying for layout, all of those things. So, so yeah, it's the only thing that's different for me is that I'm reusing existing contents, all public domain stuff. I'm just taking stuff that nobody's looked at in upwards of a hundred years and saying, let's put this back out in a package that is useful and helpful. The first one we're doing is a Donner Party survivor. And it's one of the girls that survived. She was the daughter of James Donner.

00:50:17 SPEAKER_00
And it's not only the story of the Donner Party, but it's also her experience living in California afterwards. And so as she was the girl in the well sort of social media trigger at the time. She met everybody. She met John Sutter. She met Captain Fremont, who was first president of the Republic. All of those things, right? So it's an interesting book. It just has been basically out of print for 100 years. So I'm starting to dig my way through some of that stuff. But it goes back to even that requires professional cover. Requires, you know. Editing and good layout. And so, you know, just getting the index correct for everything and on the right pages costs money.

00:51:09 SPEAKER_01
Ross, on indexing, it's being laid out in InDesign. InDesign has automatic indexing.

00:51:19 SPEAKER_00
This one did not have something that was that extensive, but I ended up just throwing a body at it. Oh, okay. But the uploading of the book is not the end.

00:51:34 SPEAKER_00
of the book is not the end. Now it needs a hook. Now it needs to go back out. Now I have to send an email out to 3 ,000 librarians going, hey, if you're interested in the Donner Party and you want to have a new book for the Donner Party that is not falling apart, click here kind of thing. I have to get my own book reviewed, you know, you know, those sorts of things. And, and, and so I think this is that kind of, kind of that whole process is, is that none of this ever ends, you know, you get the first one out, you, you have to work on the second one and the second one, you know, and the second one leads from the first one, it goes to the third one. And then the fourth one, But there's a chain in there, and every step of the chain, you have to redo the same steps. And I think a lot of people just assume that that doesn't have to happen, is that I get my first book in, and people buy it, and then I'll make so much money that my second book will be good, or my second book will be trade, or maybe my second book I'll pay for a professional cover artist, and the first book doesn't do well enough, so all right, well, I'll do my second book in Canva, that kind of thing. Yeah.

00:52:52 SPEAKER_03
So I, I mean, we're coming up to the end and I would like, I mean, Ross, you have had your hand in all aspects of this business, you know, for quite some time. So, I mean, what is your piece of advice to authors, whether, you know, they have a backlist and are working on their next book or, you know, it's their first book. Like what, what is that piece of advice that you would give out to them?

00:53:21 SPEAKER_00
that this is a business or it's a choice to make it a business. You are either an author that this is your hobby or you are an author and this is your business. If you're an author and it's a hobby and you are doing a cookbook of your family's recipes and you're printing 40 copies to hand out at the next family reunion, that's great. That is not worth sending your book out for review and for publication and stuff like that because nobody is going to care unless you're going to do more with it than this or that. You have a great idea for a science fiction series. That's great. You have to get the first one done. You have to get readers for it. You have to get enough readers that they want booked to. If you are a business, then that is where you are setting that up. That is where you are going to have consistency to your covers. You're going to have the same editor so the voice stays the same. All of those parts of that. And so an author has to decide which of those two things is this. If it's a hobby, be a hobby. Get 50 people who really like your book by everyone you do. Do one every two months. Everybody's happy. If it's a business and you want to make money at this, then yes, you need the website. You need social media. You don't need them all, but you need to have at least one or two that are solid that you're participating on. You need to be willing to answer interviews and do blog posts. You need to be willing to either pay a publicist to... help you find those blogs that want to have an article from you or a podcast you like, or you need to do it yourself. If you want to sell your book at bookstores, then you have to price it correctly and make sure that you're still making some money on the back end. And then you need to make it attractive to bookstores to buy and give them a reason to buy it, which is more than I wrote a book.

00:55:10 SPEAKER_00
If the one thing I would say that is probably the trick that I have found to sell more books, then your book might be worth doing is libraries. Library budgets are hard, so you have to have a good excuse. You have to have, as we've discussed, you have to have a good review. You have to have a good package. All of those things to get a librarian to pay attention. But librarians are less sensitive about book price than a bookstore is on margin and they're not going to return it.

00:55:46 SPEAKER_01
I think that's very, very good advice. Yeah, me too. Yeah, very good because it is a business if you want to make money at it. And if you don't, that's okay. Yeah. Oh, no, that's okay too. It's a hobby and you don't care. People don't make money off their hobbies normally. The people that are always writing the great book that's going to be their retirement is, how did you market it?

00:56:13 SPEAKER_00
I would also say the last piece, I guess, and it's the third rail in book publishing, is all of these people who want to help you publish your book for $3 ,000 aren't worth $3 ,000.

00:56:30 SPEAKER_01
You can find better people.

00:56:33 SPEAKER_00
I luckily enough know enough about the industry that I can get through publishing a book without having to go there. I get why people do it or why it looks attractive, but I have yet to find anybody who's published a book through one of those services that has had a success.

00:56:53 SPEAKER_01
Especially when they're taking half of any money that comes in. Those are the ones I always warn people to stay away from.

00:57:02 SPEAKER_00
And it's an ever -growing list. Yeah.

00:57:05 SPEAKER_01
Well, thank you very much for coming, Ross. And it's citybookreviews .com, if I'm correct.

00:57:12 SPEAKER_00
correct. Citybookreviewsingular .com.

00:57:14 SPEAKER_01
Singular .com. And we're going to have links and all of that up on the website so that you can check it out there or go there directly if you remember it from here. But thank you for all the input. It was really nice to be able to talk with an editor -publisher of reviews.

00:57:32 SPEAKER_00
Thank you. It was fun to talk about it. Okay. We spend a lot of time in our office doing it, but nobody knows what the hell we do. We're a black box.

00:57:41 SPEAKER_01
Well, that's why we were curious. So thank you very much, Ross.

00:57:45 SPEAKER_00
All right. Thank you guys very much. Have a good rest of the day. Yeah, you too.

00:57:48 SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you too. Bye -bye. Bye.