Good Lesbian Books: Review Requests

If you've published a lesbian book and would like it reviewed on this blog, you're welcome to send us your story. We do have a few rules, and a warning.

The warning comes first.

We are busy!

While we intend to review every book we get, or at least every one we actively accept, that is going to become increasingly difficult. We are always behind. If you send us something, unless it is a book we have been hoping to read and getting excited about already, we probably won't read it for a month. Or even two.

We're sorry about this, but there will be five or ten equally deserving, equally potentially awesome authors in front of you.

And once we've read it, we have to actually write the review. Sometimes that happens as soon as we've finished reading. Other times it doesn't get finished for weeks. We have half finished reviews that are a month or more old. It's nothing to do with how good the book is; we may be working on too many at once, or get writer's block, or simply not have finished thinking about what we want to say.

If you haven't received a reply to your email it means that we are still finishing up the previous batch. We reply to emails as we officially accept books review. If we haven't replied, don't worry too much, we just need to get some more books out of the way.

Submitting Your Book

Email us directly at goodlesbianbook at gmail.com.

Please don't leave comments on any of the sites we're on, as we may not see it and it gets too complicated. Send requests straight to our email and we can check it and reply whenever we get time.

Either send us a quick blurb or send us the book. You can email us files or download links or gift codes for Smashwords or Amazon (Either text file or Kindle .mobi format, PDFs are a pain but will be accepted if there is no alternative. We won't love you for it though) or offer to send us actual books. We love actual books, but know that shipping to New Zealand is too much to ask in many cases. After we've finished with the books, we'll probably donate most of them to a local library or LGBTQIA support centre.

Don't expect us to pay. We couldn't afford to buy everyone's books, we may not want to buy yours anyway, and you're getting a review out of this. If it's not worth giving us a book, don't send us one.

Don't email us to tell us to 'check out this book' without actually giving us the book. We welcome suggestions, but if it even looks like an attempt to sneakily promote your own book we'll pass you by.

What Kinds of Books Do We Accept?

Well, lesbian themed ones, obviously! Your book needs to fit in with the site's theme. It must feature a female bisexual or lesbianish person. We don't mind if it falls in the grey areas of queerness, including transgender, intersex, or otherwise hard to define characters. We don't care what genre it is. We don't care how long it is, if it's an anthology, if it's part of a series. We do care about it featuring major lesbian(ish) characters and themes.

It must be a finished and published book. Proper editing is a major plus as well. A major plus.

What You Can Expect

If we tell you we're going to review it, we will. So far, we've only had one book that we haven't been able to finish, and we're still trying.

When we review it, it will be an honest review. If you don't want to read anything bad, either don't end us the book, or don't read the review. This is a reader's advisory blog, not an author promotional blog. Sometimes that means saying "this book has major problems, this is what they are". We will also comment in detail on every different editing issue we notice. And we will notice.

It may well be glowing and enthusiastic, but if not, we hope you will find it a useful critique. We do not intend to make you feel bad, but frankly, we'd rather our readers found our reviews a good guide.

When we finish the review, we are unlikely to tell you (unless we have specifically arranged to). Why? Well, it's probably something we should work on. But once you send us your book, we don't owe you anything but a review. We have to separate the review from the author or it becomes too difficult for us to write an honest review and not worry about what the author thinks and potential conflicts of interest. I'm afraid we're just a bit too introverted that way!

We do announce all reviews as they go up on our Twitter.

Can You Quote From Our Reviews?

If you want to quote a bit from our reviews, and post it somewhere to promote your book, go ahead! Don't post the whole review, obviously, but a soundbite is completely fine.

Books People Have Sent Us

(Check out some previous reviews)

Below is a (mostly) current list of all the books that authors and publishers have sent us to review. We don't update it every time someone emails us, but once we've actually reviewed something it will be on here for transparency's sake.

Not finishing a review yet could mean: the Kindle keeps eating the file (it does that a lot, which means noticing, then going back and finding the story again and then emailing it to the Kindle); we're distracted by other books or still working down the list; we're currently reading it; we got ambushed by Life and haven't been reading anything much lately; we have read it and are still thinking about what to write; we've started a review but we aren't sure how to finish it yet (we have a lot of half finished reviews lying around).

A Day at the Inn, A Night at the Palace and Other Stories by Catherine Lundoff