How many books do you review a month?

We’re not a big review site but I believe I can safely say we review anywhere between 10 to 20 books a month.

How many staff reviewers do you have?

There are seven reviewers currently.

Are you currently recruiting more reviewers? If so, what are your guidelines?

Yes, reviewers are always welcome. Guidelines to be one of our reviewers is simple:

Send me a sample review of a book. Once I review it I send the reviewer a template how I like the set up of a review done to place in the site. The next step would be for the reviewer to send me a bio, website link if any, what genres they are willing to review, and whether they accept ebooks, print copies, or both formats. Anyone interested can email me at: museitupeditor@yahoo.ca with Reviewer Request on the subject heading.

How should an author contact you about a review request? Do you review e-books as well?

On the website, our guidelines clearly mention to look over our Reviewer Contact page, find a reviewer who is suitable for the book’s genre, and to email the reviewer directly.
The reviewers preferences, whether ebook or print are mentioned.

How do you select the books you review? How do you determine which reviews to post on your site?

As I wrote above, we accept all genres except for pornographic stuff. We review anything from picture books to erotica. After all, we are a review site catering to all readers.

Do you think there’s a lot of ‘facile praise’ among many online review sites? What is your policy when it comes to negative reviews?

Unfortunately, I do believe that many ‘writer friends’ who are reviewers do help fellow writers. I find this does nothing to help the writer if the book truly is not up to par. The reviewer risks the chance of ruining their good name if it gets out after several readers purchase the book based on that reviewer’s recommendation.

As for negative reviews, we have four ratings:
1 rose = average
2 roses= good
3 roses- great read
4 roses= highly recommended

As you can see we don’t have 0 roses for bomb. We’re not there to bash. The lowest rating is one rose. In all these years I’ve only had one author who requested a review not be posted. We post all of our reviews. When a writer sends us a book, they understand a review will be posted. This year, to be honest, one of the reviewers contacted the publisher, told them she was not able to write a review based on several reasons, one being she found the book read more like a draft than a published book. That review was never written.

There was a lot of controversy last year between print publication reviewers and online bloggers. In your opinion, what defines a ‘legitimate’ reviewer?

What defines a ‘legitimate’ reviewer? One who is honest about their reviews based on an objective evaluation on the book itself and not what the reviewer might have liked the book to have contained. We judge a book based on consistency, plot, characterization…basically what you would judge when doing a critique. A few typos here and there is not going to make us write a bad review. However, change your character’s name a few chapters down, then go back again further in the book, and we’ll mention that. Headhop from one character to another, we’ll mention the difficulty in connecting with any one character because of that. These are all elementary details a writer should know before they get published. However, give us a good plot, memorable characters and situations, and we’ll praise that.