Tag Archives: The Link

Review copies don’t get returned, and other facts of life

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During my days as the Literary Arts editor for my school newspaper, The Link, I was initiated into the exciting world of book reviews. As a book geek, the idea of reading free books was a big deal to me, and once I discovered that pretty much all of the publishers throughout the U.S. and Canada would send me stuff from their current catalogues for free, just because I told them I wanted to review their new book for the paper, I was hooked. Paying for books became almost a thing of the past, overnight, as I was able to get my hands on most of the hot new titles I’d been anticipating for years.

This is but one of the perks of working in the publishing industry.

Now, on the flip side of this equation, you have independent publishers and print-on-demand publishing, where the budget for sending out review copies is limited or non-existent. With POD publishing, the author typically has to pay for each copy he or she chooses to send out, and I’ve read many articles from small and independent publishers who say it’s not worth their time and money to send books out for review at all. Fair enough. I would think the same might apply to the big houses as well, who are sending out books to bloggers who may or may not ever get around to writing about those books, and whose reviews don’t make much difference in terms of jacket blurbs (i.e. those glowing words of praise from big-shot writers like Margaret Atwood and whatnot) anyway.

All of that aside, there are still rules to requesting review copies of books, as well as etiquette involved in actually completing the reviews so that the publisher doesn’t write you off as a twit, a thief, or worse. For instance, you should always ask for books you actually intend to review, and preferably the types of books that fit in with your publication’s mandates. At Black Heart, we review mostly books by indie publishers or authors who have chosen to self-publish, along with anything we feel has a theme of rebellion or being an outsider. Although I might really want to request a review copy of a new book that falls outside those parameters, it would be dishonest for me to misrepresent these intentions and get a free book that I never intend to review, even if I will actually read it. Ya dig?

Secondly, if you don’t ever write the review, the publisher probably won’t want to send you any more books, so write the damn review! It doesn’t have to be nice, but it does have to be your honest opinion. I, personally, also prefer to abide by the Quill & Quire standard of book reviewing, which holds that while “bad books happen,” this isn’t something you should take to a personal level. Go ahead and say you didn’t like it, but don’t make it into a vendetta against the author, and certainly don’t review books by authors you have personal relationships with (positive or negative), as this will bias your review.

Finally, most publishers like to see “tear-sheets,” or copies of the review once it’s published. If you publish a blog, all you have to do is send them an email with the link to the permanent URL and voila! Done. It’s just a common courtesy to follow up, particularly if you really enjoyed the book and wrote a nice review. This will show that you’ve done your job, and if you’d like to request more books at that time, it’s a good way to reconnect with the editors and publicists in charge.

Now, on the flip side of things, if you’re an author sending your book to a publication with the intention of getting some glowing words of praise to use on your book jacket, there are also rules. The first and most important of these is this: Book reviews are not necessarily going to be positive.

Yes, I would LOVE to write positive, happy reviews of every book I’ve ever read. But I can’t, because not every book I’ve ever read has been worth reading. (For instance, I would really like to get my time and money back for having read all of those terrible books by Heidegger when I was a Philosophy student, but I suspect ol’ Nazi-lovin’ Heidegger and his estate aren’t going to be coughing up any time soon.) That’s just the way the cookie crumbles, and even if some people think your work is brilliant, there will always be someone out there who reads it and thinks it’s crap. People are weird that way, so don’t take it personally, but do understand that it’s all a roll of the dice.

Secondly, and equally important to remember is this: Books sent to publications for review will never be returned.

Why? Let’s put it this way: your book is going to be beat up by the time it’s been read through, because most reviewers like to take notes, stuff them into bags when they go to work in the morning, fling them across the room when they’re mad at their significant others, and occasionally have to use them to prop up wobbly table legs.  (The books, not their significant others.) And, frankly, once you send the book in for review, it’s no longer yours. You will never get that copy back because that’s life. You can’t go around giving people stuff and then asking for it back; this is not a borrowed copy that you lent to a friend, it’s a work copy you gave, with no strings attached, to a professional reviewer to use for his or her work. That work involves reading and commenting on your work, and therefore the material in question now becomes the property of the reviewer.

So basically, don’t ever ask me to send your book back to you. Not only will I be irritated and delete your email, but I’ll also never look kindly on any of your work again. It’s just not done, and it’s actually quite rude to insist that the reviewer do you this kind of favor when it was assumed that you understood the rules of play from the beginning.

And now that you do, there’s no reason to ask, is there?

Hot for teacher

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Image by Stephanie Vriend (photo via The Link)

Image by Stephanie Vriend (photo via The Link)

Check out my interview in The Link this week, entitled Sexy Schoolteacher Seduces Scribes, discussing my erotica writing workshop happening at Joy Toyz TOMORROW NIGHT! It’s your last chance to sign up, peeps, so hop to it.

To fuel your “hot for teacher” fantasies, here’s another erotic haiku for you:

Rock-hard morning wood
“Say hello to my little friend“
Tongue slides against shaft

Please note that while I will be teaching my students how to write erotica, I cannot provide any real-world experience, if you know what I mean. You should come prepared with some erotic images of your own! May I suggest perusing some of Andrea Hausmann’s erotic pin-up images for inspiration? She’s the lovely and talented lady who shot my bio photo, and she can do boudoir like nobody’s business. I highly recommend her, especially if you can partake in one of her fun pin-up packages.

Why you MUST sell body and soul

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A friend from my days at The Link recently posted a link to an article in The Guardian that caught my eye. The piece in question is by Jill Parkin and is entitled “Why I won’t sell body and soul.” In it, the author explains that although she has made most of her career as a freelance journalist selling confessional pieces to magazines and newspapers, she has recently been surprised by the kinds of requests she has gotten from editors, who often want her to bare her body as well as her soul.

My initial reaction was a bit of a “Yeah, and….?”, since tell-alls and confessional pieces have been around forever. They’re what keep gossip columns running and sell autobiographies. Everybody loves a juicy confession, right? But Parkin argues that this is a particular form of writing that only women engage in, which makes it a problem for anyone who calls herself a feminist or believes in the equality of the sexes. She also argues that men would never be asked to do the kinds of degrading things that women do, routinely, for a story: pitting themselves against other women in a weight-loss contest, trying out for the latest reality show (which demands photos of potential contestants in their underwear), or other self-hating, body-abusing feminine acts.

Although I think her points are valid, in terms of editors wanting more grotesque confessions and pseudo-gonzo journalism in which the writer is the entire story (rather than just a participant therein), I would disagree that this is a totally female issue. Doesn’t anyone remember Nerve’s column “I Did It For Science”? The whole concept was that a human guinea pig named Grant Stoddard would be assigned to do humiliating and degrading things, all in the name of “science,” and (as is the nature of the website) with a sexual angle. He was a male stripper (for one night), had sex with a Real Doll, and even had a friend fuck him with a replica of his own penis. He event wrote a book called Working Stiff, further detailing his experiences at Nerve. Most of the acts he was asked to perform were humiliating, and as he notes in his book, he rarely completed his tasks without the use of drugs and/or alcohol. Still, he consented to engaging in these acts, he agreed to the price Nerve paid for the pieces, and he was able to have a lot of sex with a lot of women very publicly. Does this make him a victim? Hardly.

Similarly, I feel that anyone who is writing confessionals of the sort Parkin describes is being humiliated of her own accord. As Parkin notes at the end of her piece, she can always say no, and she says that she has been turning these degrading ideas down more frequently. It seems that, in the end, it’s about the frequency of the requests, and the fact that editors are hungry for these types of pieces. It’s not the fact that people can and will and in fact volunteer themselves to be humiliated, it’s that there is a market for humiliation pieces that delight in the degradation of others. It is, very much, a reality TV syndrome.

The one line I disagree with the most, however, is this: “Male writers also raid their family lives and their own psyches for copy, but no one asks them to tear themselves apart in the process.” Don’t we? Think about the last book you read. Think about the author of that book. Was he an alcoholic? A drug addict? The type of person who pays for sex? Was he simply a terrible human being, out of whose muck and filth a beautiful book grew? It’s totally Nietzschean:

“[…] one does best to separate an artist from his work, not taking him as seriously as his work. He is, after all, only the precondition of his work, the womb, the soil, sometimes the dung and manure on which, out of which, it grows—and therefore in most cases something one must forget if one is to enjoy the work itself.” (On the Genealogy of Morals, 100–101)

Male and female writers alike are asked to tear themselves apart in the quest to produce art. And, frankly, I don’t think that writers who are well-adjusted produce much in the way of great art. (Though there are, of course, shining exceptions.) I don’t say that tearing yourself apart will necessarily create art, but that this rending of self certainly isn’t new, and certainly isn’t an unexpected by-product in the creation of art.

But what do you think, you writers and artists? Is the destruction and even humiliation of an individual the only way to create art? And does it matter that the “art” produced by this behaviour is so lowbrow? Should we feel sorry for these women (and men), who feel they have no choice but to prostitute themselves—body and soul—through the medium of journalism for a few dollars? Where do your sympathies lie?