« A Story about Low-Profile Folks Helping One Another—Especially Writers, Booklovers »

Here’s a story about how people who do not have name recognition can help one another—especially when it comes to reading and reviewing books we like. This story praises the services of Midwest Book Review.

“Established in 1976, the Midwest Book Review is … committed to promoting literacy, library use, and small press publishing.” With that simple, descriptive, opening sentence to the organization’s website, the Midwest Book Review (MBR) tells us they publish no less than NINE magazines each month filled with reviews of books. These magazines go to librarians (both community and academic), booksellers, and the general reading public.

My experience with James Cox, editor-in-chief, has been cordial and helpful. He conveyed most affirmatively that he wanted to run a review of my book. However, he’d run out of reviewers (they approve about 2000 books per month for review but have reviewers for only 600) before mine was assigned to one. He invited me to submit a review from another reviewer provided I got the reviewer’s permission. I promptly asked Kevin Nenstiel who’d written a review, posted it to Amazon as well as his website. He felt honored and now that review of my book appears in the May edition of the MBR magazine Reviewer’s Bookwatch. (The review of my book appears just above “Ann’s Bookshelf.”) Cox does not care for the Amazon star-rating system and says that any book they accept for review is a 5-star book. He says more about this and other viewpoints in the article about MBR on Wikipedia.

My thanks to James Cox, MBR, and Kevin Nenstiel for a most affirming experience.