Buying books looked a lot different thirty years ago. If you wanted to know how good a book was, you read a newspaper, or asked your friends for recommendations. Then you had to find the physical copy on a shelf somewhere, in a bookstore or a library (Remember libraries? Sigh.) There was no Kindle, no social media, no Amazon—no comment section. While literary consumption may have been simpler thirty years ago, it certainly was not easier.
Our access to content and marketing tools has increased tenfold, but there remains an economic imbalance: not all writers have the resources or marketing teams to take advantage of these platforms. Writers rely heavily on positive reviews on websites like Goodreads and Amazon for visibility and, in February 2018, PRISM decided to take up the cause. Along with a team of volunteers, we hosted a Review-a-Thon aimed at books by Indigenous authors, elevating important voices and increasing their consumer visibility.
Want to host your own Review-a-Thon? Here are some steps to get the party rolling:
Gather your people. It takes a village! PRISM partnered with UBC’s Indigenous lit reading group, The Reading Circle, to ensure we accomplished as many reviews as possible in a condensed period of time. For your own Review-a-Thon, look around for adjacent communities with similar values, feed them snacks, and make some teamwork magic happen!
Register yourselves for Goodreads and Amazon accounts. In order to post reviews, you need to have registered accounts with the various platforms. Some of our team members decided to create pseudonyms under which they would rate and post reviews, which can also be a fun get-to-know-each-other activity for a team that may be an amalgamation of many different communities. (“Hi, my name is Marcy and my pseudonym is ih8cardio, it’s lovely to meet you all.”)
Have some reviews prepared ahead of the actual event. The goal is to be as efficient as possible when you actually have your reviewers gathered in one space. One way to ensure maximum efficiency is to have your reviewers come in prepared with a couple of substantial reviews (2-3 paragraphs per book) that other members of the Review-a-Thon can glean from when writing their own reviews of those books.
Keep the physical copies of the books close by. Not only is this a practical way for reviewers to flip through and find their favourite lines to spice up their reviews, but it also just feels warm and fuzzy to be in the collective presence of so many powerful works of art.
Engage with your online supporters. Through The Reading Circle’s Facebook page, we were able to liaise with members of our community who wanted to help but couldn’t be physically present. In order to keep them in the loop, we posted a link to a Google doc in which each reviewer could post the books they reviewed, the reviews themselves, and the platforms they posted the reviews on.
Revisit your reviews. Often, your reviews won’t show up on the platforms until several days later, after Amazon and Goodreads have passed them through their own reviewing department, so you likely won’t be able to up-vote each other’s reviews on the day of your Review-a-Thon (I know “review” sounds like a fake word by now, but stick with me). What you should do is touch base with your reviewers a week or so after the event and encourage them to “like” each other’s posts so that your reviews are the first ones to appear when a potential buyer searches a book on one of the platforms. This is where the Google doc will come in handy.
Pro tip: Keep it positive. Listen to your mother when she says, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” I believe that if you didn’t enjoy a book, you shouldn’t review it. Obviously this rule wouldn’t apply to works that outwardly appropriate, stereotype or marginalize specific groups of people (in which case, be loud! ear-splittingly loud!). But for the most part, we are all just artists who want to share our art with the world. Support one another.
Want to get started ASAP? Fabulous! Here is a list of books we rated and reviewed in conjunction with The Reading Circle. Feel free to do the same, or simply “like” the positive comments. A little good karma never hurt anyone.
Books We Rated and Reviewed:
Katherena Vermette’s North End Love Songs
Katherena Vermette’s The Break
Liz Howard’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent
Carleigh Baker’s Bad Endings
Roseanna Deerchild’s Calling Down the Sky
Joshua Whitehead’s Full-Metal Indigiqueer
Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed
Jónína Kirton’s Page as Bone Ink As Blood
Gwen Benaway’s Passage
Jordan Abel’s Injun
Louise Bernice Halfe’s The Crooked Good
Billy-Ray Belcourt’s This Wound is a World
Micheline Maylor’s Little Wildheart
Lisa Bird-Wilson’s Just Pretending
Armand Garnet Ruffo’s The Thunderbird Poems
Leanne Simpson’s This Accident of Being Lost
Marie Clements’ Tombs of the Vanishing Indian
Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City
Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves
Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas
Marie Clements’ The Unnatural and Accidental Women
Cherie Dimaline’s Red Rooms
Bev Sellars’ Price Paid: The Fight for First Nations Survival
Wanda John-Kehewin’s In The Dog House
Rita Bouvier’s Nakamowin’sa for the Seasons
Marilyn Dumont’s The Pemmican Eaters
Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
Tomson Highway’s From Oral to Written: A Celebration of Indigenous Literature in Canada, 1980-2010
Happy reviewing!
Molly Cross-Blanchard is a Metis writer from the prairies currently living as a guest on unceded Musqueam territory. Her work has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, The Malahat Review and In/Words, and her debut chapbook is forthcoming Spring 2018 with Rahila’s Ghost Press. She is the incoming circulation editor at PRISM international.