Bewildering Stories Editorial

How Can I Promote My New Book
at Bewildering Stories?

by Don Webb

Hi, [veteran contributor],

Yes, BwS does offer a couple of ways to promote books. An author can have a book review by engaging a veteran contributor to write one. Or a veteran contributor may volunteer to write one. Or an author can have an excerpt, as well as reviews, by becoming a veteran contributor.

What is a “veteran contributor”? Anyone who is listed in our Biographies & Bibliographies index.

To explain: I suppose we can call the two ways to promotion “the hard way” and “the easy way.”

• “The hard way” is a book review.

Reviews are very hard to come by. Normally, review requests come to BwS “over the transom,” i.e. out of the blue. Most of them are for books by authors who are not — or not yet — contributors to BwS.

I acknowledge each request and forward it to our Reviews editor. Sometimes the editor is interested, sometimes not. Otherwise, you can ask any other veteran contributor to review your book. Procedure: I’ll forward the request to the person in question with an invitation to reply directly to you or your publisher. One person at a time, of course.

The reviewer has to be someone we know; otherwise, we would be flooded with reviews of who knows what by who knows whom. And we have to guard against worst-case scenarios, such as the famous “author as reviewer” cited in “Promotion: Three Case Studies” in issue 448.

• “The easy way” is to send an excerpt.

Full information is available under the links at Contacts & Submissions / Excerpts offer. The same work may have both an excerpt and any number of reviews. They normally appear in non-consecutive issues.

The same condition applies to excerpts as to reviews: to send us one, you have to “join the club,” i.e. be a veteran contributor to Bewildering Stories.

Reviews and excerpts are one of Bewildering Stories’ treasures. It’s hiding in plain sight in our Reviews index.

Copyright © 2015 by Don Webb
for Bewildering Stories