The Self-Publishing Review

A few years ago I wrote an article in which I stated that I thought that most self-published books are pretty bad; and I was challenged by a self-published writer who objected to my claim.

I had taken a look at quite a few self-published books at that stage and felt that I was on pretty safe ground: but I realised that it was quite possible that the self-published books I’d seen didn’t fairly represent the overall standard and that perhaps I was being unfair. And so I decided I’d start reviewing self-published books in order to rectify that.

Because my original view was that most self-published books are bad, I realised I needed a way to quantify not just which ones were good and which ones weren’t, but also why they were good or bad. And so I decided that the best way to do that would be to review them as if they were books from the slush piles I once worked with, and to try to explain why I would have rejected them and why, on occasion, I found them compelling.

You can take a look at the blog which resulted from this here, at The Self-Publishing Review. I very rarely look at more than one book a week; when I dislike a book, I make my views clear; I have a backlog of books to review, and so there’s a disgustingly long wait between books being submitted and being reviewed (which makes it even more like those slush piles!); and I sometimes have to take time off from reviewing as my paid-for work has to take priority. If you’d like to send your own books for review, you’re welcome to contact me for submissions guidelines: and if you’d like to add your views to the discussions there, then that would be good too.
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