Easy for me to say. I just received a professional review and it was better than I hoped for. So what’s next?
To back up a bit: as a self published author, I highly recommend everything that Jane Friedman says. Her advice “Start Here: How to Self:Publish Your Book” is a wealth of information.
While my first novel “The Last Daughter of Elizabeth Light” was entirely edited and pulled together on the Amazon self publishing portal. Lots of lessons were learned from this experience; the biggest lesson was to publish on IngramSpark.
Why IngramSpark:
Your book will be on Amazon anyway and… there seems to be a bit of negativity surrounding Amazon.
Your book will be listed on Bookshop.org where a potential buyer will be able to choose any book store to order from. You can see on this link that my book has already been discounted. Plus libraries order from IngramSpark, too.
If you approach a bookstore directly to purchase copies of your book through IngramSpark, they will get 40-55% discount from the list price. This is a much greater incentive than Amazon, and, if the books are unsold, they can return them to the publisher(you) or they can destroy them. All this is explained on their website.
Back to my original question of Kirkus and why I chose to have my book “The Claudia Stories: Tales of New York City” Kirkus reviewed.
Curiosity and a marketing tool. And…” with a Kirkus indie review, authors can have the opportunity to build some name recognition and get noticed by agents, publishers and other industry influencers. Kirkus has been an industry-trusted source for honest and accessible reviews since 1933 and has helped countless authors build credibility in the publishing realm ever since.” Kirkus
So here’s the lead:
“A thoughtful meditation on the ways our lives touch others in an increasingly isolated world.” –Kirkus Review
BOOK REVIEW
In LeFlore’s novel, a young woman journeys from Brooklyn to Park Avenue for a job interview, touching numerous lives along the way.
Early one morning, Claudia Marron leaves her home in Brooklyn, where she lives with her grandmother, for a 90-minute journey to Park Avenue in Manhattan for a job interview. Changing trains and eventually switching to the bus, she has fleeting interactions with fellow denizens of New York City. As her life briefly dips to meet theirs, vignettes illuminate their everyday realities and secrets; Claudia comes into contact with such figures as a convenience store owner staring down a threatening customer, a beautiful Telemundo executive carrying a secret, an unhappily married bus driver, a wizened Manhattan nanny on her 70th birthday, and a wealthy woman whose daughter has disappeared (“What if I hadn’t been so careless?”). The stories are presented as snippets cut from life, often ending on cliffhangers. LeFlore’s prose style is sparse but evocative—little details go a long way, and the lives of the characters convincingly change with the city as Claudia moves from her working-class neighborhood to an elite, moneyed Park Avenue apartment building. Her journey effectively evokes the intensity of city; eight million lives stacked on top of each other, each as vivid as the next. One could read this book and conclude that the people Claudia passes by don’t affect her at all—she has no way of knowing that the elderly nanny she spoke with on the bus had a heart attack later that morning, or that the wealthy woman who interviewed her was trying to avoid her ex-con mother. A deeper reading suggests that each individual has changed her in ways she can’t articulate. By the end of the book, unlike several of the people whose paths she’s crossed, Claudia ends up in a hopeful place. – Kirkus Review
Next up the marketing journey.
