Column: The Critical Eye – Book Triage

2.9.10: Book Triage

Here is a practical example of what I do each week with incoming books. This picture is a sorta-light load of books for a week–about 225 titles total and one T-shirt (was part of a media kit, and got separated from the book within a couple of seconds.). It took me about an hour to unpack and sort, so each book only gets maybe 15 seconds (on average) of processing time. Within that 15 seconds, I place a book into one of several piles.

Pile 1 – Requested book or interesting book — high priority to get reviewed.

Pile 2 – Not requested, don’t remember requesting — will make available to our reviewers for them to decide if they want to review it.

Pile 3 – Didn’t request, not compelling – might or might not put out for review.

Pile 1 is usually the smallest. I have a pretty good memory, so if I requested a book from a publisher, I’ll usually remember. (While we don’t review every book we request, it has a much higher chance of being reviewed than a book we didn’t request.) Something new and interesting will get added to that pile as I unpack.

Pile 2 is probably the largest. We get lots of unrequested books, and those get sorted mostly based on that 15-second impression. Packaging counts too. A book sent wrapped in a grocery bag as the envelope will probably go into Pile 3. Most self-published books also go into Pile 3 right off the bat, until I have time to look at them (POD books are highly recognizable as opposed to a mass-produced book, and my experience with POD books is that most of them don’t get picked up for review).

From this particular load, I got several hand-written notes, including one from a local author sending in his book. He referenced reading the paper and that we’d recommended several books he’d gone on to read himself and enjoy – Pile 2, even though the book looked POD (the note helped, as does being a local author).

The T-shirt with a book was probably a nice touch, but as it doesn’t stack well, got separated from the book, and now I don’t know which one it belonged to.

I got one hand-written media kit with a book (a cover page hand-written – TITLE Media Kit).

There was one indy publicist sent us a load of all their new books. Probably 20 in total. Most of those will probably go out for review.

We had a large load of ARCs this time around–about 30 total. Those help in getting books reviewed in a timely manner. We have probably a 30-45-day lag on average to get a book in, out to a reviewer, and back ready for publication. So, getting an ARC 60+ days in advance helps us get the review into the issue the month the book is hitting the stores, and we like being able to do that.

Next week: A Tale of Two Publishers, or why some publishers get a higher percentage of books reviewed than others.

–Ross Rojek
ross@1776productions.com