Dadburnit!

Okay, so I'm currently trying to compile a list of review site options for Aspen Mountain Press.  Compiling the romance/erotica list was easy.  What's NOT so easy is finding genre fiction review sites.  Oh sure--there are the big, sparkly fantasy reviewers with all the bells and whistles on their sites--like fantasy name generators...are you serious?--but many of them have some variation of the following line:

We only accept commerically published authors.

Okay, let's stop and analyze that statement.  Many of these review sites mean "We only want to review books that are published by the big fantasy houses like Dell or Tor." I'm sure their purpose is to keep self-published authors and those with vanity presses (like the one who shall not be named who is scamming my mother-in-law despite my repeated pleas for her to run as fast as she can) from swamping their inboxes with low-quality stories and badly refurbished fan fic.  Yeah. I get it. I'm down with that. I don't blame you.

But what about the small, independent publishers?  What about e-publishers?  What happens to them?

Some of the large romance review sites, like Love Romances and More or Night Owls Reviews saw the need for e-book review sites and opened their doors to a flood of submissions. That's great and vastly appreciated, but not what I'm looking for.  I'm looking for a genre specific site for fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery ebooks.

It's frustrating.

What's even MORE frustrating about it is that I'm sitting here thinking to myself, "Well,heck I'd do it if I didn't already have too much time allotted to writing/editing/worldbuilding/review submitting/moving/cat care/husband care/daughter dilemma dealing/house cleaning/house restoring/snow shoveling/cooking/sleeping/lovemaking/bathing/eating/et cetera as it is!"  Surely there's someone who'll do this, right?  Right?

Not yet. I'm moving through a humongous list of alleged genre reviewers and I still keep running into a definite 'we don't read e-books' mentality.  I'm going to keep looking.  Maybe I'll find one. I'm searching in the "L's" at the moment and it is 3:11 pm on 1/6/10.  Let's see how long it takes.

4:04 pm. -- I'm starting to think that this many bored housewives who have review blogs have lucked into a good thing.  Maybe I'll have time to review books too...just in case I had a bookshelf that was needing filled.  Good grief--some of these sites!  But, alas, even bored housewives have e-book prejudices.  The search goes on...and I'm only in the N's.

4:29 -- Well, that's a new one. Never heard of someone refusing to review e-books because of DRMs. Nah...don't need to be hardballed just to get a book reviewed.  Still looking.

4:54 -- I'm finding some sites, but ones that either don't seem appropriate (ie--adolescent run) or are too obviously in the give-me-free-books-scam. I have now noted 2--that's right TWO--sites in between the letters A and R that might be outlets for submission.

And success comes in the unlikeliest of places...and well into the S's I might add. Hurray. Someone to pester.

So why the prejudice? With the latest e-readers garnering favorable reviews and the quality of e-books going up, what's the problem? My best guess is that reviewers are inundated by self-published or vanity-published authors and, to be quite frank, there have been some e-publishers (now mostly defunct) who have been guilty to rushing not-quite-ready-for-any-time books to the e-reading public. There are some really good stories out there in e-pubbed genre fiction and not all of it is erotic!

Somehow, some way I will push my foot into the door of these sparkly bastions of reviewing. Either that or I'll create a nom de plume and start my own site.  Why not? There's no such thing as too many books, right?

Right?