Rejected

I'm not surprised that BookSirens rejected me; it's happened twice before, but there's always that little glimmer of hope. I'm not taking it personally this time. The second time it happened, I contacted them to ask what what was lacking in my submission, so that I could improve my future chances. The guy sent a one-sentence response that essentially stated, "Don't assume there was anything wrong with your book." Realistically, I can deduce that the service has few women's fiction readers; one of its possible rejection reasons states that they may not have enough readers in a particular genre. It's still hard not to view every rejection as a reflection of my work. 

That leaves me adrift. A minuscule number of services review or find reviews for pre-published books. Believe me, I've searched. Booksprout leans heavily toward romance, and I only managed to get two or three reviews for my women's fiction novella.  

Some of the well-known services out there are misleading. For example, BookFunnel doesn't find ARC readers; it only facilitates the distribution of your book to readers you already have. Well, if I had my own readers, I wouldn't be searching for an ARC review site! Other sites are outrageously priced, plus their track records are opaque. Any site can claim anything; that doesn't make it true.

It's bizarre the lengths I've gone to, just to maybe find one reviewer. I found a place called OnlineBookClub that has a free option, but there is absolutely no guarantee of securing one single reader. That's why immediately upon uploading, I received an email from them, essentially stating that if I really want a chance at getting reviewed, I should purchase their guaranteed review package. For one review? No thanks. Its FAQs actually state that if you can't afford to advertise your book, you shouldn't be publishing in the first place. Well, thanks for putting me in my place! You seem friendly.

I also found an article listing various review sites, all of them ridiculously expensive. In the comments, though, someone in the UK had touted their new service (that's free), so why not? Well, again, if I want a guaranteed review, it turns out it's not free. But for $35.00, I took the plunge. The place is called Bookshelfie, whose drawback is that women's fiction isn't one of its listed genres, so I went with the old literary fiction choice, even though my novel is hardly literary. 

I'm really grasping at straws at this point. Even the articles I'm finding are obscure, not to mention their recommendations. If these places were so successful, they'd be higher up in my search results.

For some reason, though, I actually got a subscriber to my Substack. That's never happened to me before. She didn't volunteer to read my book, but at least she subscribed. That's my victory for the week. 

My halfhearted quest continues. I don't expect to find any site that's both reasonably priced and legitimate, but I've got nothing but time at this point, so I'll exhaust Google before I finally give up.