I write book reviews for the Bookreporter site; I’ve been doing that for about ten years. The way that Bookreporter works is that they get a pile of books from publishers, and once a month, they send out a spreadsheet to their reviewers to choose which books they would like to review for that month. So if you want me to review your book for Bookreporter, you can’t just send me the book, it’s got to go through them. If you want to tell me that you’ve sent a book there, and I decide I want to review it, I’ll maybe take a look at it. No guarantees.
I am a reviewer on NetGalley, but I don’t spend a lot of time browsing around there for books to read; my to-read shelf is pretty extensive. (Plus you have to ask mother-may-I if you can have a book, and after over a decade of asking mother-may-I from literary agents and getting nowhere, I am pretty sick of that particular game.) If you have a book on NetGalley and want me to take a look at it (especially if I can get it in Kindle format) I will take a look at it, again, no guarantees. (I use NetGalley as a publisher, and I cordially detest having to do so, you end up giving your book away to every mook who wants one, and half of them never do squat with it, and the other half either can’t write worth squat or are with the Goodreads Mean Girls Brigade. NetGalley is way too expensive, but it’s the only game in town.)
Most book review sites have some kind of policy against reviewing self-published books. I’m self-published myself; I’m never going to turn down a book just because it’s self-published. I have my own criteria for figuring out what I’m going to read, and what I’m going to write about, and it is idiosyncratic as hell. I read a lot of history and historical fiction. I like right-wing political books, generally speaking. I like books about submarines. (There is a damnfool commercial on right now where an unctuous fake psychiatrist tells a perfectly inoffensive person who’s reading a book about submarines to stop reading books about submarines because their father reads similar books; that raises my blood pressure like you would not believe.) But that’s not everything I read, and (unless it’s conventional romance or erotica) I am willing to give your book a decent shot. You can check out what I’ve read at Goodreads if you want.
If you have a book, and want me to read it, shoot me an email at blueduck (at) gmail (dot) com and if I’m interested I will ask to take a look at it, Kindle version only. If you send me a book in the mail I will likely ignore it. (I got on a list for HarperCollins reviewers some time back, and they occasionally send me the damnedest things, and I ignore most of those.) If you are allergic to email and want to contact me with the social media icons at the top of the page, that’s fine, I guess, if that’s your jam.
Please don’t have any hard feelings if I say no. And understand one thing; selling books (and the only reason you should ask for reviews is to sell more books) will not make you happy. Agatha Christie sold more books than anyone on this earth and she was so unhappy she faked her own death. Think about that.