“How do I get good endorsements for my debut novel?”

The best part of my job as a writing coach and editor is the opportunity to mentor aspiring authors. A significant amount of my time with aspiring authors ends up on an invoice, but not all of it, not by a long shot.

You are probably already familiar with the Wordsmith Writing Coaches "less-than-15-minutes-is-free" policy, which encourages our clients to contact their coaches with any little thing at any time, whenever it comes up. If we can solve your problem, answer your question, or edit your snippet of text in fifteen minutes or less, we won't charge you for it. We won't even keep track of how often you ask us (if you interrupt us too often we'll let you know; every coach will have a different threshold but all of us are happy to honor the spirit of this policy, and none of us have yet to feel like a client is taking advantage of us).

Then there's Writing Lab, prepaid live coaching or editing at a ridiculously low price, also rarely used to full advantage.

And PRESS, our international online writers' group, which gives you even more interaction with me for an even lower price: the monthly membership fees barely cover the group's expenses, they don't make me wealthy.

There's also Quora, and Substack, and YouTube, and plain old email & texts, in which I answer questions and get into conversations that will never be charged to anyone else's account but my own. My wife thinks I spend too much time on this sort of thing, and perhaps I do. But that's because I love it, it brings me life and joy. If it helps others too, then all the more reason to keep it up.

An example is an email I sent to a young aspiring author whose manuscript we had just finished editing. He said good things about our work (which I probably should have repeated here) and then asked me how to find endorsements or ARC reviews for this debut novel of his.

Here is my reply:

Thank you for your kind words! Glad we could help.

As for finding endorsements from fellow authors, there are several approaches. (This is not an exhaustive list!) The first one that comes to mind is simply meeting and chatting with authors at SF&F conferences and conventions. Sorry we didn't have this conversation earlier, because you missed a few easy wins here in SoCal: the California Creative Writers Conference, the LA Times Festival of Books, and the Writers & Illustrators of the Future annual awards dinner. Life, The Universe, and Everything (LTUE.net) would have been a great opportunity too, but that was way back in February, and in Provo, Utah... So, here are my top five ideas:

1. If you can find a fantasy writers' event near you in the next month or so, attend it. 
   • Bring a printed or digital ARC ("Advance Review Copy" —or "galley copy" or "unpublished proof copy" as we used to call them) with you to hand out.
   • If it's just a .pdf or .epub ARC, you can make a business card with the cover image of the book on the front and a brief book blurb & QR code on the backside.
   • The QR code's landing page needs nothing more than
     1. the full-length book blurb,
     2. the cover image,
     3. a download link for the ARC you want them to read, and
     4. a text window (like the Comment box of a blog post) where people can leave questions, comments —and endorsements/reviews).
   • Having cards to hand out will greatly increase the number of authors and fans you can ask to read the book, and are less cumbersome than printed copies. (DO NOT print the cover art on the cover of a printed ARC. A plain cover with the title and the words "unedited advance review copy" on the front is a good idea.)
   • Do not ask every living creature to review your book. Ask people "so, what's your jam?" and they'll let you know whether they are authors, editors, agents, publishers, illustrators, or some assortment thereof. Let them know you have a book coming out, and be ready with your one-sentence pitch (or "log line" in the screenwriting world). If they are interested, and you think their endorsement might be helpful, offer them a card and ask them to write an endorsement for the book if they like it.
   • Do not offer to pay them if their endorsement is chosen to appear on the book's cover or interior pages... but you can say that you're hoping to recruit a volunteer launch team and you'll share book swag or free copies with launch team members. If they like your story, you'd love to have them on your team. That's honest, and leaves the writing of an endorsement to one side as a natural unspoken corollary of loving your book and wanting to help you launch it.
2. Consider StoryOriginApp.com. Evan Gow is a great guy who runs a great site & beta-reading service, and many authors swear by StoryOrigin. Your publisher might not like it, though. Self-published "authorpreneurs" love it. It makes the most sense when you take advantage of everything it offers, though, not the review-seeking alone.
3. BetaBooks.co (not .com) is another great site that focuses almost exclusively on connecting beta readers with new or not-yet-published books. Your publisher will like it better than StoryOrigin but you'll also need to bring your own beta readers & potential endorsers. I haven't had much luck with the organic reach or ambient findability on BetaBooks.
   • You might pair BetaBooks with personal outreach at events: make that QR code send folks to your book's BetaBooks page? It's more work to set up, and requires the reader to create a BetaBooks account too, but it also gives you so much data about when, how fast, and how far people are reading through your book*, while letting them comment paragraph by paragraph if they desire.
     • *Brace yourself. This data can be demoralizing. Beta readers are distracted humans like the rest of us, be patient with them.
4. Write Cute, an author networking service by Plottr. I love this idea, but I haven't yet done one myself. It seems like an awesome combination of fun, quick, and effective: "speed dating for authors." You get to know a dozen different authors in your genre, super fast, and all of you are there expressly because you want to do manuscript swaps or ask for endorsements or arrange cross-promotions of their work with yours, etc. Finally, highly-motivated professional authors (the uncommitted and the pikers don't bother with such things!) gathering for the express purpose of endorsing and cross-promoting one another's work! This might be your best solution. Get on their email list and see when the next one will come up. It might cost something to participate, but I'll bet it is both affordable and worth many times what you'll pay.
5. Join your local writers' society, association, guild, or what-have-you. This is a longer-term strategy, but can be the most effective one yet, unless lightning happens to strike in one of the previous contexts and you manage to bottle it in the moment. (I chatted for half an hour with a friendly guy at the hotel bar at LTUE once; didn't realize it was Kevin J Anderson until he was leaving and someone asked him to autograph one of his books for them!) Volunteer with them. Help lead it, if needed. (hint: volunteer leaders are ALWAYS needed. Make yourself useful, helpful, kind, reliable, and you'll be a VP in three years. Or a well-known volunteer with the informal influence of a VP, which is even better.) Every such group I've ever known has several successful, well-regarded, eloquent Persons of Influence associated with it: famous authors, respected editors or agents, successful television producers, whatever. If you volunteer in a humble, helpful, reliable, skilled way, you will get to know those core people personally, and they will get to know you. They will love you. They will, in time, be delighted to write glowing (if carefully worded) endorsements for your work because they want to help you succeed.

I can, but will not, name five or six such Persons of Influence from my own analogous experience; it has been a wonderfully rewarding eight years with that outfit, and my "insider" relationships feel like happy lagniappe, not the achievement of an ulterior motive. I'm genuinely glad to have found my people, and I am better because of them.