Aw. Kirkus didn't like "Cruel Sister". At least, I can't tell, but I don't think they did. The review is more snarky than anything else.

They complete missed the reason for Ringan being affected, and got most of the plot summation wrong.

I was wondering when Kirkus would finally dislike something I wrote; they generally hate everything.

Aw. Bummer.

Nah. It's not even a bad review - it's more snarky than anything else. I suspect they gave it to someone who does the "I don't read ANYTHING that even comes CLOSE to woo-woo!', who rolled their eyes and cashed the cheque.

Laura Ann Gilman has promised to teach me the Secret Handshake; Kirkus has loathed everything of hers, pretty much down the line.

With Kirkus, Editor & Publisher and Library Journal someone told me that what is important is getting the review, not whether the review is good. True? False?

Huh. Good question, Gar. Never stopped to consider it.

At least two of them have always reviewed everything I've ever published in long fiction form, so I have no experience of it the other way.

I think a bad review can do damage, especially from PW, because smaller pubs around the country just lift from the original review, tweak the occasional word so they won't have to pay PW reprint rights or get his with copyright infringement stuff, and reprint it as their own.

Now that you have several out and in libraries etc - can it hurt you as much?

(Because we library patrons want to read the next book in the series and then if there's a new series -- we want that too.)

sumi, thing is, something like a starred review in PW will get stores and libraries to order more than a run of the mill or negative review. And I suspect that just getting the review does, in fact, move things up the list.

But it's a very wide pool they have to choose from. So good is all the way better, and bad can cut your institutional and chain store sales.

Speaking of libraries, ours seems to have brought your collection up to date.

Oh, don't know if I'm the only one who did not know this. But if you want to promote library sales, ask people during book tours and what have to order them from libraries. Small libraries will often order a book if even one patron asks. Sometimes larger ones as well, but certainly if they get three or four requests for a book. You have to weigh whether encouraging library sales costs book store sales, though I gather if you are not on the best seller list the answer is probably "no".

News to anyone? Is there more of tradeoff between library and book sales than I think?

I always encourage library sales; they tend to buy in good numbers. And even though they buy at a lower cost, the contract with the publisher specifies that they can only pay your the lower royalty rate up to half of whatever the units sold is.