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“How Do I Get My Book Reviewed (Nicely)?” by Roger Sutton As an author or illustrator for children, your job is to create the best book you possibly can. A reviewer’s job is to evaluate that book. That is the essential nature of the relationship between the author and the reviewer, and it’s not a relationship that, on the face of it, looks to be headed for the altar anytime soon. There is an odd inequality at work: reviewers can’t exist without authors, and books do succeed despite negative or ho-hum reviews — Bridges of Madison County, anyone? At the same time, authors enjoy glowing reviews and are angered or hurt by negative ones, or by no review at all. Soon after I came to the Horn Book in 1996 I received a letter from an author I didn’t know, but one of whose books I had previously recommended at The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books. She wrote that all of her previous books had been ignored by The Horn Book Magazine, and she had hoped that things would now be different. I wanted to use a great line passed along by my Horn Book predecessor, Anita Silvey, who was once confronted by a writer who snapped, “You’ve never reviewed one of my books!” Anita, with a gracious smile, replied, “Not yet.” In the happy rush of completing a book and having it published, writers can forget that theirs is just one of the thousands of books delivered each year to the offices of the Horn Book and our comrades Booklist, BCCB, School Library Journal, etc. For the author, that book is likely to be the most important thing in his or her life for awhile; for the reviewer, it is just as likely to be simply one more bound galley or f & g in a tall and wobbling stack. Is there a way to get your book to the top of that stack? Not really. A phone call from an author or publisher regarding the review status of a particular title will only yield the information that the book has been received (or not); further entreaties will be politely deflected. This cool reception is by no means meant to demonstrate a lack of interest; it is simply evidence of our strong belief that a book review is written for the reader, not the author, and not the publisher. Reviewers don’t write negative reviews to make authors feel bad. At the same time, we don’t write starred reviews to make authors happy. Ideally, the author doesn’t come into it at all, and each book is allowed to stand or fall on its own merits. Who determines those merits, and who determines what gets reviewed in the first place? The answers to these questions will differ depending on the review source. School Library Journal and The Horn Book Guide, for example, review “unselectively,” that is, SLJ aims to review “all new children’s and young adult single-title trade books from established publishers as well as selected titles of general interest from specialized or regional presses,” while the Guide reviews all new hardcover titles for children and young adults from U.S. publishers listed in Literary Market Place. Booklist reviews only recommended titles; BCCB and The Horn Book Magazine are more idiosyncratic in their selection, choosing the books both recommended and not, that they feel their subscribers should know about. At all of these journals (and bear in mind that there are several others, including VOYA and Riverbank Review, worthy of your attention), the merits of any given book are judged by the reviewer together with the review editor, a balance that will tip one way or the other depending on the journal and on the book in question. For example, at the Horn Book we publish reviews with which I do not agree, sometimes because the reviewer makes a strong case for his or her evaluation, sometimes because I recognize in myself a lack of empathy for the kind of book under review. Good reviewers know that neither “I liked it” nor “I didn’t like it” should be the basis for a review. (Good reviewers also know when the problem is with themselves, and not with the book.) Instead, the reviewer needs to try and figure out what a particular book is trying to do, and to assess just how well the job gets done. Is this process subjective? Certainly. But some opinions are worth more than others. I believe, as well, that reviewers offer more than an “opinion.” We bring to each review our experience with children and books, and some ideas about how the two can be brought together. We also bring knowledge of the history of books for children and awareness of what other books are being published at the same time as the particular book under review. This knowledge of the past and present is essential to understanding where on that axis a particular book fits; charting that point is probably the reviewer’s most important task. Our job is not to tell readers what children will like — our readers already know that. Similarly, the fact that thousands of children may or may not be likely to enjoy a particular title is of little consequence to the reviewer: I don’t care how many Harry Potters are sold; I still think that series has problems. Some authors like to read reviews of their books, some do not, some ask a friend or spouse or editor to “filter” them. I would never presume to think that my reviews change how a writer writes (see the Horn Book Magazine September/October editorial for more on this), but I do think reading reviews — not necessarily of your own books — could be a healthy part of a writer’s literary diet. You get to see the ways reviewers think, the questions they ask, the concerns being demonstrated in the field at large. You may also discover some great new books. But you won’t learn how to write the book the reviewer wants to read, and it’s a good thing, too. Books that seem calculated, written-to-order, or patently outlined all assume that the reader wants to see what he or she has seen before, but if there is any prayer that the members of the ecumenical council of book reviewers hold in common it is: “Surprise me!”
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