If you haven’t yet read The New Men, make sure you do so once you’re out of the hospital and before you have to go back.

(And, no, I’m never going to get tired of that stupid joke.)

If you have read the novel, please consider writing a customer review, especially on Amazon. Especially if you liked it, but even if you found it kinda meh. I’m belatedly learning that, for a variety of reasons, customer reviews are hugely important for books released by small presses.

Just a few sentences is all it takes–and there’s no need to get fancy. Just say what you would have wanted to know about the book when you were deciding whether or not to invest your time and money in it.

Obviously, this is a highly self-serving post on my part. But I do want to stress that this applies well beyond my own little novel. If you’re reading a book from a small press and you like it or the press, the few extra minutes you spend writing a review will be genuinely helpful. Far more helpful than the same time spent reviewing a book from a big press.

Think about it like being one of the first people to review a new, local restaurant on Yelp. People in the neighborhood have no idea what to expect when the place first opens up, so if the early reviews are good, people will give it a shot and the restaurant has a chance to take off. If there are no reviews or if there are only three brutal ones, that restaurant could be dead in the water.  In contrast, reviews #362-371 of a twenty-year-old Olive Garden probably aren’t going to move the dial much in either direction. Nobody reads #367 and yells out, “Hey, Dave. Dave! Did you know Olive Garden has bread sticks? Fornicate me sideways–bread sticks!!! We are totally going tonight, dude.”