Malasz

Image courtesy of Futurama Wiki Back in March of 2010, I submitted my novel Armistice Day to this blog in hopes of scoring a review. I was a newly minted indie author with a box full of copies that I bought from my printer (Lulu). The book was several years in the making. I'd attended the local adult ed writers workshop for several semesters, had the book professionally edited, sent out dozens of agent queries, and after realizing I had to publish it myself, commissioned a freelance artist to make the cover. It was now time for marketing. I figured the easiest way to get my name out there was to submit my book for review to whichever blogs would take it. I don't believe in spamming people, so I carefully researched for the right sites. At the time, indie authors were treated like vermin. Scant few blogs would review indie authors, and only a portion of them reviewed sci-fi. This blog was one of the few. In fact, it was dedicated to self-published authors. The blog's owner,...

It would seem that ours is one of several blogs that were damaged overnight. All of our links to our book reviews are gone. All of our links to other book review blogs are gone. Still trying to get a handle on this. I'm hoping that they can be restored from a backup as restoring all of them on my own would be exceedingly difficult. UPDATE 9:25 AM EST: Used one of those archive websites to salvage the links just in case Google can't restore them. That knocks the task down from "Herculean" to a "slog." UPDATE 9/30 12:00 PM EST: I received this message: Restoring the gadgets may take up several days. You can add and fill the gadgets yourself, or wait for Blogger engineering to restore the repaired gadgets. With no immediate resolution to this problem, I suppose I'll have to restore them myself when I find the time. UPDATE 10/21 8:00 AM EST: I have finished restoring all of our blogrolls and book review link lists. \_/ DED

I'm pleased to announce that author Richard Abbott has joined the ranks of the New Podler Staff. Richard is the author of Far from the Spaceports , which I reviewed earlier this month. Besides science fiction, Richard also writes historical fiction. His other novels include The Flame Before Us , Scenes from a Life , In a Milk and Honeyed Land . Richard will be joining us as a reviewer. He hopes to discover some science and speculative fiction that offers optimistic, rather than pessimistic, outlooks with good characters and prose to boot. Welcome aboard, Richard!

We apologize for the lack of posts. We've been busy cleaning out the old slush, taking much needed vacations, recruiting new reviewers, and getting caught up on old reading lists. But fear not, we will have more reviews. As I write this, the Bookworm's Fancy is crafting a review. Rob and I are reading our next selections. Our new recruit, Bertha Thacule, is eagerly anticipating the arrival of her first book for review. Libby is still searching for a match. And the submissions keep coming. Over on GooglePlus, we're having some problems with our update stream. It seems that most of our announcements have gone missing. And the Bookworm's Fancy has learned that we are not alone. Perhaps we need to have Twitter as a fallback platform for G+. ;) \_/ DED UPDATE 9/10/13: Ok, it looks like Google+ is back to normal. The missing announcements have returned.

We've finally done it. The New Podler Review of Books has taken its first step into social media. You can now find us on GooglePlus . So why did it take us so long? Because no one wanted to do it. Back when the blog's namesake founder was here, site promotion was his responsibility. There was a MySpace page, but when he went AWOL that page stagnated and died. And then MySpace died too when everyone abandoned it for Facebook. While MySpace has come back from the dead as some music and movie industries promo monster, its new form is alien to us. So that left the members of the Podler Staff to handle PR. Yes, we received your invites to friend you on Facebook but no one wanted the responsibility of managing a Facebook page. I abhor Facebook because I'm an anti-social curmudgeon. Excuse me a second. Hey, you kids! Get off my lawn! Where was I? Oh yeah, Facebook. So while I hate it, the others all have busy lives and didn't need the extra time suck. So why are we now on G...

On behalf of The New Podler Review of Books, I'd like to welcome Erin Eymard to our review staff. Erin is a mother, geek, and avid reader. She fell in love with First King of Shannara in the seventh grade and has been hooked on sci-fi/fantasy ever since. Among her favorite authors are Terry Brooks, Anne McCaffrey, David Edding, and Dawn Cook (Kim Harrison). When she isn't reading, working, or being a mommy, she enjoys fishing and watching football. Erin runs her own blog, The Bookworm's Fancy , which is a mix of reviews, author interviews, and musings about writing and the publishing industry. Details regarding her reading preferences will be found on our Submission Guidelines page when we're open. Welcome aboard, Erin!

Our email address has been snatched up by an email marketing company. No real surprise there. This is the Internet Age after all. We don't mind having our site listed on indie book reviewer lists. Most of them are courteous to both author and reviewer. They list the reviewer's likes and dislikes and other submission guidelines, and even provide a link to the reviewer's site. This is the right way to go about it. They save the author time in their hunt for reviews and the reviewers from having to deal with books they're not interested in. But that's not how this marketing company operates. Authors pay a fee to generate an email marketing campaign . Judging by the format of these emails, they fill out a form listing pertinent info about themselves and their book. Upon completion, it gets shot out to every book reviewer in their database, regardless of the reviewer's book preferences. We're tired of this. There's a reason why we have submission guidelines ....

Yeah, we're still here. Everyone is busy so there isn't much time for reviews. We've added some social media buttons. They'll show up at the bottom of each post and review. You'll now be able to email, blog, tweet, post to facebook, or google+ whenever you see something here you'd like to share with the rest of the world. These buttons are located down near the link for comments. For authors, we've got text at the top of the right column that will tell you whether or not we're open to submissions. That will save you from having to click on the "Submissions Guidelines" tab to find out our submissions status. However, you'll still have to click on it to find out who is accepting submissions and what they're interested in. And if you're reading our blog on a small wireless device, both the left and right columns are cut off so you'll have to click on the "view as webpage" (where available) link to see it. Otherwise you...