Finding reviewers

It’s good to build up a team of reviewers. I’ve started that and I give you access to them: http://www.gilljameswriter.eu/p/my-dream-team.html You can see it’s small as yet but we’re constantly adding to it. Would you like to join? You can find more detail here: http://www.gilljameswriter.eu/search/label/Dreamteam and sign up for any of the DreamTeam opportunities.

There are also various lists of reviewers. This one is quite good: http://melanierockett.com/book-reviewers-directory/ However, you have to work carefully with it. Often you’ll spend a lot of time finding the right reviewer, only to find that they’re not taking on any more reading right at this moment.

In the end, you will need to create your own team of reviewers. This will probably depend on you keeping a well-curated mailing list. This will take time to build up.

There is another side to this: we should all make the effort to review. It need only be a couple of lines sometimes and a star-rating. Naturally, though, this mustn’t take away too much of your own writing time. I’ll qualify this a little, however, and say that reviewing is writing – but you know what I mean.

I give a 4* or 5* review to anything that really wows me and I’ll also put that on my site http://gillsrecommendedreads.blogspot.co.uk/ If I’m invited to review I’ll be brutally honest though I will try and contact the author if I can if it’s going to be dire.

You do have to be careful that you don’t get into a tit-for-tat situation. You can’t offer good reviews for the sake of obtaining good reviews. That could be worse that fake news and alternative facts. Just as you should only like on Facebook and Twitter what you genuinely like.