 I think we made me a minute or so early, but I don't know if you've heard anything to get started. My name is Harry Bolz. I'm the Director of the Central Kansas Library System and the Great Bed and Public Library. And I'm pleased to be here with that in PLA. I'm glad you're attending my session. There are handouts. I put some on the back chairs and a drawer here on the side. On this table, there are some samples of books that I've reviewed over the years. And you're welcome to look through them. I would get to do it and not take them with you. But you're certainly welcome to look through them. And if somebody wants to take them and pass them around and we're talking, we can do that. Or at the end, there may be time for you to go over and look at them. Well, I'm interested. How many of you actually, in your current position, read book reviews? I'm just about all of you. I think it's almost every handle of. So what I want you to do when I count to three, I want everybody to say the journal that they read the most book reviews out of. One, two, three. I heard library, maybe someone would just laugh. But that's interesting because that's the journal that I started with and I have done one other journal and I'm not doing that one currently. But writing book reviews can be a lot of fun. But I did this workshop 10 or 12 years ago in Kansas at the Library Association. I used to call it book reviewing for fun and profit because there are some people that, for a library journal, would read books. And at the end, where the book was actually published, a library journal would send you a fresh copy and then they would donate that to their library and you know what the retail manufacturer's retail suggested prices in the front of the book or the back of the book. And they would take tax deduction for the books that they donate to the library. So that kind of was a profit part. There's one journal forward magazine that did pay like 25 bucks for review. So there again was kind of a profit thing. I've probably done any work of 130 to 150 reviews. I'm not doing too many anymore. I think I've maybe done a couple this year. And part of the reason is my area that I chose to do was really hot. Back in 93 when I started. And I kid people that the only thing that I've ever risked for the last 20 years is Russian history. And facets of Russian history. And people kind of screw up their notes with that one. That's not my favorite kind of word. But now is your chance. As you read those reviews, you probably read hundreds and hundreds of reviews. And obviously being here today, you're saying, you know what? I'd like to do that. I think I could do that. So that's what we're going to do today. And I visited with Francine Fyokoff at LK before she retired just a month or so ago. And she was pleased that I was doing this again because Library Journal does need book reviewers. So this is an opportunity for you to get started. Some of the satisfaction in doing this is seeing your name published. Have any of you ever written an article for a journal before? I see several hands. So for the rest of you to see your name in print is really quite satisfying. So that's probably one of the reasons to do it. And you know what? It's great to put on your resume that you're actually doing some writing and you're published. And another thing is once you get started with a journal and you learn the editors, then you have a connection. If you do want to write an article, you know the editor to call and say, I'm writing an article, can you expedite this one? You know, sometimes that actually works. At my peak of reviewing Russian history probably in the late 90s or early 2000s, I was doing it one year twice. I did 13 books. And when you realize that they give you about three weeks to read and write your review, that doesn't leave much time to do with anything else, particularly the kind of crap somebody had to read. So some of them were good, some of them were not. So how do you get started today in book reviewing? If you have your hands out and they're around the room. Let's take a look at it so you see what all is in here. After the title page, there's the actual presentation that I'm doing. And then the next page is a page that comes in the book that tells when you review the issue and gives you information about what library journal wants to review. The next page right off their website are the guidelines for reviewing for library journal. And that's really important for you to read and understand before you get started because if you don't do it in their style, they will not like it. And that's a problem. The application didn't come out very well, but you can see the application is the next thing. And then there are a couple pages of questions that they want you to respond to so that they get a feel for what you do. And then there's an actual contract that you sign for library journal. And right at the end, I found a really good article to show you that a lot of people think that books are not dead. Books are not going away. And they assured me at library journal that last year they published or they were involved with more books than they ever have in any other year. So books are still being published and they need to be reviewed. So at least it worked when we tested it. I remember one of the first Internet workshops that I did at a school in Humboldt, Kansas. And that's when I had this spring recorded 150 feet down the aisle and through the hallway it didn't be obvious what it is. And I worked for an hour and a half trying to get the Internet to work in the bucket. And so the whole time I was trying to get it to work, I was saying, this is what you would have seen. So I guess we can do that. This is what you would have seen. This is the highlight of my program. You've got to see my slide. I'll tell you what, let's read these buckets. Read these buckets. We don't need that. We need the microphone. Does anybody need it? We need the microphone. You can see by your handout that the first thing you need to do is kind of assess your strength. What do you have to give to a library journal that they're going to want? And that's pretty important. If you have an advanced degree in a field to show that you're sort of an expert in that field, that's a good thing. So this is my Getting Started slide here. That's what we're doing now. If your advanced degree is in art history, that works. There are all different kinds of genres that have materials that need to be reviewed. You need to select a publication. If you like library journals or if you're doing book lists or doing any of the other journals, you want to decide which one you want to start with. I don't suggest that you apply all of them. Take one and give it your best shot. You need to read book reviews that they've been publishing so that you get a feel for the style and the way it's written. Because your reviewing has to fit in to the way they want it. So if you read the reviews and you are comfortable with that style, then you say, well, I can do that. And remember the key is to take the contents of a 200 to 800 page book and condense it down into 200 words including the bibliography. So you have to start thinking, can I capture the contents of a book and get it succinctly on the page the way that particular journal wants you to do it. You've got the guidelines. So if you read through the guidelines, some of the things that I look at when I'm writing a review that are guidelines. Number one is getting the bibliography in the style that they want it with the author, the title, and then all of the other things that are in the page numbers. If it's got pictures in it, if it's got plates in it, if it's got an index, you need to get that in the right order. And then your review as it's written for Library Journal is number one. You want to connect the author with previous publications and with similar publications. But you can't do that in a paragraph. You have to do it in a sentence. And then you have to get into the contents of the book. So you get into the contents and I'll get into this a little bit more in the next section. But it's the guidelines of how they want it written and I've given you the guidelines so you can read that that are really important to follow and you'll see that a little bit later. And then besides filling out the application, and it was different when I did it 25 years ago, but if you can write a sample review of a book that you don't think that anybody's reviewing, so you find some obscure book that you do a review on, and you send it in with the application because you can go on the website and get all of that information. And you go on the application with your review, you send it in, and you wait and see if it's something that they want and need. And you can see in some of the information I've given you that they need almost every genre a reviewer for. So all you have to do is be brave enough to get it started, to get the ball rolling. So how do we do it? And that's what I started with before. Well the first thing you need to do is you've got three weeks. You've got a 600 page book. And it's boring as heck. You still have to read it. And when you read it, you have to read it sort of critically because you're going to compare it to other works. You're going to decide if the author is getting his point across. That's why you pay really, really close attention to the forward or the introduction. Because it's in those sections that the author says, this is what I intend to do. And then your whole reading of the book is to prove or disprove whether the author has done that. So as you're reading it, and if you look at my samples over here, most of them I write in the margins, I make notes, I put question marks. And so when I'm ready to write my review, and oftentimes I will transfer the pertinent information to one of the blank pages so that when I'm writing my review, I go to that page and I know where the notes are that I want to look back on. You can quote from a galley, but you have to cite it exactly where it is in the galley so that they can check it in the final copy and make sure it's on the same pages. Every time you get a book, it comes basically from Library Journal, but it comes from the publisher to Library Journal to you. And in that book, usually is a page that has a lot of apparently graphic information on it because sometimes it's not complete in the galley. Sometimes they don't know the number of pages, they don't know what they have to put the index in the galley. So you need to look at that kind of information on what's provided. Sometimes it's on the back of the book on the cover, sometimes it's on the last page, but you need to discover where the correct bibliographic information is. But you don't want to read what someone else has already written about that book. Why would you not do that? That's a rhetorical question, by the way. It's because that would color your writing. It's really tempting when you're struggling to capture the essence of a book, I'm going to peek at what someone else wrote and see if that helps me out a little bit. And I won't say that I've never done that, but it's not right to take someone else's thoughts. We know that, and claim them as our own. So we don't read what someone else has written on most of the galleys. Or if you get a book in its final version, which is happening more and more, you'll have the cover flap that has everybody's craze of the book and why you should buy this book, and then you want to stay away from that. So you make notes of your impressions, the readability, the accuracy, and whether the author has delivered what they promised in the introduction or the forward. Certainly you need to follow the guidelines of the publication, which we've mentioned several times. And you need to be succinct, but you've got to provide enough information for you as librarians to decide whether you want that book. How many of you will only buy a book if you're satisfied with the review? Oh, nobody. I've got a couple here. Okay, how many of you read the review and that colors your decision somewhat on whether you're going to buy it or not? Okay, that's maybe more accurate. So that's because whoever writing those reviews have made it clear what the book is about and at the end, at least a library journal, you're supposed to do what's now called the verdict. Remember that? And the verdict is, you know, who is it suited for? Should someone really like this? So that's pretty important for you to provide that information to people like you who rely on them. Okay, please do not. Because on all of this information there's the publisher's name and address and you've got the editor's name on there, you've got their phone number and maybe twice in 20 years I've called the editor and it was to ask a specific question that I didn't understand probably in the bibliography. So don't call the publisher. If you really, really hate a book and it's really driving you crazy, never write a negative review. Library journals probably won't publish this. I don't know about some of the other ones. If you don't like it, send it back. If you can't get through it, send it back. I remember one time I wrote two reviews, one for actually publishing and one that I wish they would publish and it's one of those that I, it was one of these academic books, you know, somebody, some lowly professor having to publish a book so they get tenure and I said, and you've heard this before, you know, professors have to publish or perish or not publish teachers, professors. And I said this one should have perished. And they didn't use that one. They did my other one. So anyway, don't do negative reviews. And I've already said this before. Don't copy from what someone else has written. Okay, it needs to be your thoughts. It needs to be your impressions. You're the librarian writing for other librarians. You're not a friend. You're not the publisher's aide trying to get this book sold. You're writing it for people like you. Another thing is don't worry about grammar and spelling. You know, you may come across something that is not spelled right. And if that is truly something you found as you submit your review, which is usually in the body of an email to the editor, you can make a little note down at the bottom. By the way, on page 61 of the galley, this word is misspelled. But that's not part of your review. If the book is not written, well, if it's not written so that it made you feel like you want to continue, you can reflect that, but you don't want to get into the specifics of what's left down. That's in a separate note to the editor. And of course, don't cross any of those barriers. Okay, about editors. I've had probably four editors in the last 20 years, and they all react differently to your writing. The first one in particular, when I would send in a review, and back then, and they sent you the copy, they would have a laminated copy of your review stuck inside. And I was first couple times I'd pull out that review and read it, and I said, this is what I wrote. Because the editor had taken my words and made it kind of funky and flowery and things like that wasn't me, but I never complained. I just said, oh well, it looks good. And so you just need to be aware that editors will do things. The last editor that I had had, we got into several pitch arguments about something that I've said in my review, and they didn't understand what I was trying to get across, and I suppose it's important. But I liked the way I said it. So when I wrote my explanation, it supported the way I said it, and then she would email back something else, and we had some emails flying back and forth, and it was not real comfortable sometimes. So just be aware that an editor may change what you've written now. They prefer that you write it and the editor doesn't do much changing. That's the way it's been for the last three or four years. They don't go in and rewrite it for you. They just want you to do it right. Editors really aren't human. They will visit with you. They do criticize. So that's just part of the course. Do we have any questions? When you get to the end of the presentation, if you keep talking, you're in trouble. So I have some sample books that we can go over and look at. You can see how I've written in the margins of them. You can see the kind of things that you get, the kind of things that you have to do. And I said I would show you one of the worst books that I had reviewed. This is one of the early galleys that I got. And you can see it's not in a real nice format. But from my historical perspective, the author did not talk about solos, outcasts, like I remembered them from history. And so that's what I said in the review. It wasn't a negative review. But what it said was, you know, I don't agree with this. And I didn't go around in the room with the editor a little bit about that. So that's one of the worst things that I've had to review. I've had like 800-page books that I think a professor was going to use for a textbook. And those are really nasty to get through. And let me show you some of the really good ones. This is one called Matasha's Dance. It's a cultural history of reality, which was really, really quite pleasant to read, even though it was a very large book. Brett Millianair, a political biography of Willie Munsonberg, was a good book to read. And one called So Don Give Journey. And this particular one is about Russian history. It's a very interesting in France from Jefferson to the Javay. And these were three of the ones that, you know, you really like to read. So do we have any questions about writing book reviews? Yes? Or is that enough to fill the floor? Repeat the question, please. The question is, if I would send a book back, which I think I only did once in 25 years, do you see it show up again? Did someone else read it because they liked it and they wrote the review? And, you know, I don't know the answer to that. That's a good one I should probably ask. I would think if the expert in the field didn't like it and sent it back, that they probably wouldn't send it to someone else, but I can't tell you for sure. And should they not try to do a review of it? You know, again, that's another good question. I don't know what criteria the editors at that library generally have for what they review. And I'm sure they don't do everything. Well, they do some how-to, but they don't do any mechanical explanations or really do a little bit of medical do. But, you know, there are quite a few things that they don't do. And again, if you look through the material that you have, I think it kind of lists the genres, or I thought I maybe wrote it somewhere, but it's pretty wide. And I don't know, and I don't think LJ is at this conference to ask anybody. Yes? So what you're saying is if you do not have, if you can't find a good review of a book, or even a review of a book, then it's more often not any good. Well, I know there's probably a lot of vanity self-publishing that doesn't get anybody to review it. So that probably is not the case. And again, I'm not sure. I really couldn't tell you, but I know there are some things that don't get reviewed simply because they don't submit it to anyone. So, you know, and again, that's kind of what the publisher is for, to get it out to different journals for reviewing. So if you've got a good publisher, then you have a good chance of getting a book reviewed. Yes? I once reviewed a book in galley form that was so littered with typos and other layout errors that it was a chore to get through and it was a specialty in my specialty area, so I just swung through it. But if it's in the galley and it's in terrible construction, does that give them time to tell the publisher they need to go back and clean it up? Well, hopefully, you know, I don't know what the time frame is, but hopefully they've got somebody working on that as you're reviewing it. And the question was, one person in the audience got a galley that was full of mistakes and spelling errors and layout errors that it was a real chore to get through and wondered if there wasn't enough time for the publisher to go back and correct it before they published it. Hopefully, that's the case because that would kind of become a laughing stock, I would think, if it were published out like some question over here. I have read some negative reviews, so there must be varying degrees of how negative reviews could be. Possibly. So some of them have been, but you're just saying, library reviews. Right, that's great. And that question was an audience, person in the audience has read negative reviews, I don't know if you've met library journals, but maybe in other journals. In other journals. And so, evidently, there are some degrees of negative reviews that do get through and I'm sure that happens, but I was told I should not submit a negative review. Have you ever had an author take issue with your review or something you've said in the review? Have I ever had an author take issue of something I said in a review? You know what, they never get that far. I'm sure that they're over and over the setting at dinner time with friends. They probably first me quite a bit, I don't know. But what I have seen, and particularly when I was able to write my review more of my voice without the editor screwing it up, my reviews were in Amazon, in Borders, when you went and looked for a book and you went down to the reviews, my review was usually there. So I thought I must be doing the fun, should we do it? You would like it to be? I didn't have to be totally glorified. I mean that means that when I'm reading it that maybe it's not quite... Well, no, you can certainly point out something that you don't think makes it a great book. For example, you might say that the author never did prove his point kind of thing. But then when you get down to the verdict, instead of saying something like, this high school should never read this book or whatever, what you're doing is you're saying who can read it, who would be the audience for this book. So that's where you certainly would not be negative, it's in the verdict. Anymore? Yes? You mentioned at the beginning that some years you've done as many as 13 books. Do you have the option, if they ask you to do a book and you don't have time to do it and they're timeframe to turn it down? Yeah, well what happens is you're sitting in your office and suddenly FedEx brings you a book and it says that your book is due and they put the date on the slip of paper. So what you would have to do is stick it back in the mail with a little note that says I don't have time to do it now. But, and this does bring up a good point. If you turn down too many books, they're not going to send you books. And the other thing is if you don't get them in on time, they're not going to send you books because when they send you a book they want it usually for the next issue. So if you don't get it in on time and that can be a problem because sometimes you take a book and it's a big, thick book and you don't know you're going to get busy, but you have to finish it. And that's when you're tempted to skip chapters, you know, read the first two chapters and then go and read the ending and scrape together the review. I'm not going to say that I've never done that, but I did do it very often. But you want to get the review in on time, but they give you three weeks, that's the date they want it in and you're submitting it by email. So you can't wait till the afternoon of the 21st day and send it in and still read okay. I have emailed to them and said it's going to be a few days late because and that seems to have worked. So, yes, yes, yes. In the application there is information about the kinds of things you would like to do. If there are no more questions and we are probably a little bit early, I'm not sure how much early, you're welcome to look at some of the things that I've reviewed and how I've done it. And so you've got a few extra minutes for coffee. Thank you.