Book Review Policy

Story Doctor has a team.

Some of us review just book and movies, while some review K-Dramas or anime along with books. Some of us only does professional critiques and reviews books only when the other team members recommend them. Some of designs and illustrates book covers along with reviewing books!

Sometimes, to help writers fix some issues that we regularly find while reading, we tend to search good "Writing-Advice" from talented authors' blogs. And we post them here with their permission mentioning their names and blog-links.

If you are an author/editor/fiction expert who writes blogs about writing, and if you want us to post & share your articles with you as the guest author, contact us.

If you're here to get reviews on your published or soon-to-be-published books read the policies below and follow the guidelines in our contact page. [Please, follow the guidelines. That way our requests stay in not-so-messy-form]

So, when we accept your offer to review your book, we will do the following things--

• All of us will add your book to our 'To-Read' shelves in Goodreads. This will automatically post on our twitter, too. And we will add the book sparsely, so that our twitter home page don't get spam-y.

• If you mail just one of us a physical-copy, we will post a good photo of that book on twitter from Story Doctor's profile. And we will share the hard-copy among us.

We donate a big portion of the physical copies we receive to the local book-reading place when we are done reading. This way the book you send us may get more readers.

• The moment one of us finishes your book, the review will be posted in Goodreads and Amazon from Story Doctor's Goodreads and Amazon account.

• Story Doctor will post it here in blog, if they like the book enough. Sometimes, Story Doctor might like the prose/ story itself, but not the book cover. In that case, Story Doctor will have the right to not to post it on blog, or maybe delete the post after a month or two. But the reviews on Goodreads and Amazon will definitely stay. In such cases, sending a physical book might help. Because, an artist will know how to make a book look good when it's captured in a frame. Everyone in Story Doctor's team is an artist or a photographer.

• ATTENTION, AUTHORS! We try to stay active in social media, mostly to get as much attention to the books we review as possible. And here comes the quality of your prose into a massive role-play. If your book has great prose, with great lines that we just loved reading them, we usually search them in the quote-directory in Goodreads. And we like them, and they get posted on Twitter, too. Sometimes, we don't find the quotes we want to share because the authors didn't add them in the Goodreads quote directory. In that case, we tend to pass. So to encourage us to like/share your quotes, add them in Goodreads please. Remember, the more the no- of 'good-lines' the more will be the number of updates about your book in the feed. This way great books will gain more posts from all of us.

• TRANSPARENCY: If the book is really good, and at least one of us likes it enough to convince the rest of us to read it, well, then of course, the rest of us will read it and give reviews on Goodreads from their accounts, too. This happens when one of us recommends to others inside the team. We try to help books that deserve the attention.

• We give honest reviews. We want to help both the readers and the authors. Especially, if you're a great author unheard of. We don't tend to scrutinize too much, unless it's a book with over-hype that we expected something special, but in the end, we were disappointed. So in our review tones, our style is mostly: "No expectations, and discover the gem" vs "High expectations killed by reality." Which category does your book fall into?

• About "STARRED" or "HALL OF FAME" ... Now, we don't really give 1 or 2 stars from Story Doctor. It's not a personal account. It's more of an editorial review of a great team to help the authors. Plus, while giving reviews we keep the book's audience in our mind. So, 5 star is basically what most of its 'targeted audience' will give 5 to; STARRED means we really enjoyed the book, while HALL OF FAME means your book is as timeless as The Handmaid's Tale or To Kill a Mockingbird or The Lord Of The Rings, and it deserves 6 or more out of 5, no matter how crazy it sounds in terms of math. So, if you're a reader, reading our blog, go to our HALL OF FAME pages. And you'll find what we can never forget.