My Christmas Wish: Duotrope for Review Sites

As I was falling asleep last night (my usual good idea time), I realized what sort of service could rock the worlds of book reviewers and independent/small press authors alike: a Duotrope for review sites.

If you've ever used Duotrope, you know the awesomeness of its color-coordinated search function, the glory of its detailed information and statistics. What if such a site existed to help books get reviews? Think of the myriad ways you could streamline your search for review sites.

Let's see, I'll look for:

• genre: romance
• subgenre: paranormal
• length: novel
• theme: YA
• price: free
• wait time: 4 months or less
• type: pre-publication (hoping to bump that first week of sales, right?)
• and definitely simultaneous submission! I can't see any reviewer objecting to that, anyway.

Then I click "Search", and ideally dozens of reviewers for paranormal YA romance pop onto my screen. I begin perusing, reading the details of each reviewer's guidelines for submission, and choose which to submit to. Some request a first chapter to see whether they like my style. Others want a query first. Others don't care and will accept my entire novel file as an attachment.  Following everyone's guidelines precisely, I send off half a dozen simultaneous requests for review. Three reviewers bounce back a generic "no thank you", and three accept, putting my book into their review queue. Half an hour of work, and I've netted three reviews! I am over the moon!

Registered users would have a monthly per-book request limit to prevent spamming; abuse of the feature would get you banned. Review markets would have their responses catalogued by authors when (or if) the reviews were posted, and review times would be compared with posted wait times for authors' perusal (satisfaction with the review is so subjective that it's not necessary to record--the reviewer isn't talking to the author, anyway, but to readers). The stats lists for fastest responses, least likely to post a review, number of markets for any given genre, most likely to accept a book, etc., would be very useful, and would encourage reviewers to do their best in order to draw more traffic and better books to their sites.

 Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? If you've ever had to search, and search, and search, for active review sites, you know the pain of realizing that the one site that sounds perfectly matched to your novel's style has been inactive for three months. That's one of the reasons I chose the Duotrope model: Duotrope actively checks with its 3600+ listed markets at least once per month to make sure they are still active. They add new sites and retire old ones regularly, keeping the listing as current as possible for the thousands of people who use the resource they provide. A function like this would do the same for the always-fluctuating review-site markets as well, giving assurance to review-seekers that the listed markets will actually respond to their requests.

If you were an author, how much would this service be worth to you, saving you all that time searching? Currently, Duotrope is free, running on donations for maintaining its publishing-market listings. If they or someone else expanded into the review market, I would hope that authors would donate gratefully. I know I would.

Dear Santa, if I wish really hard and be a very good girl, can I get this for Christmas? I'll leave you all the cookies you want.