Sunday, November 28, 2010

Important: GUD Revives Reviews

After a break of almost a year, GUD is now in a position to resume reviewing books. We're tremendously excited to be restoring this valuable service to our readers, and hope you are too.

Reviews will be published on the site and syndicated across Amazon, BookRabbit, Goodreads, Facebook, and other major book sites. We've had a lot of review requests while our reviews have been in abeyance, and I've spent much of today going through them in order to see what's on offer.

There's an amazing selection of books out there, from GUD contributor Kristine Ong Muslim's poetry collection A Roomful of Machines to Drama Queens With Love Scenes, a tale of unrequited gay love in the afterlife by Kevin Klehr.

In the past, we've tried to review almost everything we're offered, but unfortunately this didn't work out all that well, with our staff suffocating under piles of unread books. So, we've introduced a new system that will come into force this month.

Requests for review should still be sent to reviews@gudmagazine.com. Put the title of your book in the subject line. The decision whether or not to invite you to submit your book for review will be based on the information you provide in this email, so it's vital to consider carefully what you want us to know.

The least you should tell us will be the title of your book, its ISBN (where appropriate), the name of the publisher, and a brief summary of the book's plot and/or contents, and the formats in which it's available. Please note that we will only consider reviewing self-published or vanity books under special circumstances, eg if you are a GUD contributor.

Once we receive your review request, we'll add it to our list of books available for review, and see if anyone on staff grabs it. If, after a month, nobody's chosen the book, then, regrettably, we're not going to be able to review it. If your book is selected for review, you'll be asked to make a copy available to our reviewer in the format of their choosing.

We'll be keeping track of books offered for review using a Goodreads shelf entitled, imaginatively, 'offered_for_review'. Only GUD could have thought of it.

A final note. We've gone through our inbox and added books offered for review from September 2010 to date, but I regret we're not able to go back any further than that. So, if you asked us to review a book before September 1st and/or you sent in your request after September 1st, but your book's not on our 'offered for review' shelf, by all means get in touch again. Meanwhile, watch this space.

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