Review Guidelines
We love reading and reviewing books, but we have a limited amount of time between the volunteer staff we have. As our staff are volunteers, we leave it up to them as to what books they would like to read and review from the ARCs we receive.
Our review policy is stated below is as follows.
Relevance
This, I feel goes without saying. If it isn’t grimdark and we haven’t directly asked for it from you or your publisher, then our readers likely aren’t going to come to our blog to read about it. “Grim aspects” or “grim elements” won’t cut it–we are after grimdark books. Give us a grim story set in a dark world told by a morally grey protagonist and we’re interested.
Solicited Books
We guarantee you a review. We’ll approach you for an ecopy or paperback ARC and get the review up as soon as possible with plenty of social links. If you can also provide a cover image, un-altered cover artwork image (it looks better on our blog featured image), blurb, and pre-order links / details, that’d be appreciated.
Unsolicited Books
Unless you’re working with a publisher we already know, then say g’day online in the Grimdark Fiction Readers and Writers Group. Approach Adrian through there, his own Facebook page, or adrian@grimdarkmagazine.com. If Adrian thinks one of the team will like it, he’ll ask for an ebook ARC.*
If accepted, the books will be loaded to the team ARC folder for a period of six months. If a team member picks it up for review, we’ll post the review – nine times out of ten – on the GdM blog, else it’ll go in the quarterly mag. If a team member doesn’t pick it up, then the book will be removed from the folder after six months.
No discussion will be entered into as to why the book wasn’t initially accepted by Adrian, or why it wasn’t picked up by a GdM team member within the six-month period, nor will the period be extended. As stated above, our team are passionate volunteers generous enough to donate their time to the GdM team and the grimdark community–what they choose to read and review is entirely up to them.
* Self-published books are generally a hard sell. As much as we love all the self-published action and talent out there–and there is some seriously awesome stuff in the grimdark self-published market that we definitely want to get our hands on–the reality is that way too many of the self-published books we are approached to review just don’t cut the mustard. Generally, Adrian will approach those self-published authors he thinks the GdM team would love to read and review.
Format
Our team prefer mobi or ePub. It also makes it easier for me to move the book to another reviewer if the original reviewer pulls out. AND it saves you a few dollars. If you want to send a print copy, that’s your call.
No PDFs. Say it with me. “No PDFs.” They are the bane of a reviewer’s existence, and I won’t put my team members through that. If you can’t be stuffed downloading Calibre and turning your word document into a mobi or ePub file, then we can’t be stuffed reviewing your book.
