Welcome to Dear Author. You may be wondering why we address our reviews to you, the author. This is actually just a stylized form of the review and even though it is addressed to you, it is meant for readers.

Q:  What types of books do you review?

We review contemporary romance books, paranormal romance books, historical romance books, urban fantasy, science fiction, and fantasy.  From time to time, we will review mystery books but rarely.  The site is primarily devoted to the romance genre.  If you are looking for a review of a non fiction or a memoir, our site is not right for you.  If you have a genre fiction book, we will be interested.

Q: How do I get my book reviewed at Dear Author?

If you are an author, we can’t promise that we will read your book or that if we read it, we’ll like it. If we don’t like it, we could post a scathing review. Some people don’t like that. If you are one of those people, please don’t submit your book for review. If you are okay with those qualifications, please send a BLURB and an EXCERPT in the body of the email to Jane.  No links will be accepted.  If you do not follow these instructions, we will delete the email inquiry and will not respond.  We prefer e-versions of your books and will be more likely to read them than a paper copy.

The reason for these stricter requirements is because we field at least 10 requests a day and we must have an easy way to get through them.

Q: Do you accept self published books?

Yes but it needs to be professionally edited.

Q: Do you accept advertising?

Yes we do accept advertising but we are sold out for 2011 and 2012. There will be two ads slots in 2013. There is a discounted price for authors so please email ads at dearauthor.com for full details. The reservation book for 2013 will be opened sometime in July or August of 2012.

You must pay and/or cancel 30 days in advance.   Accounts not paid within terms are subject to a 10% finance charge.

The ad space must be 200×300 and under 100K file download size.   We recommend animations be limited to 15 seconds.

We reserve the right to, unilaterally, REJECT, OMIT, or CANCEL advertising which it deems to be not in the best interest of the audience of Dear Author, or which by its tone, content, or appearance is not in keeping with the tone of the website.

During the month you advertise, your ad and your click through link will be mentioned in an ad round up post on first Saturday of the month with the other advertisers.

We accept gif, swf, jpg, and png files.

Q: What’s the First Page thing?

We invite authors, both established and aspiring, to submit one page for critique. You can email the submission to Jane.   You can see previous first page critiques here. You should aim for about 400-600 words for a first page.

Q: How do I participate in the “First Sale” series?

First sale series is by invitation only but you can certainly email Jane to ask if she has any available dates. We post the Author’s First Sale letter around the release date of a new book. The first sale series has been temporarily suspended.

Q: I’m a new author and would like to be profiled by Alyson H as part of the new author interview series.

Alyson H. brings Dear Author occasional interviews with newly-published authors. If you are an author with your first (or perhaps second) novel coming out, and you’d like to be considered for an interview, send your name, web information, and release date to DAintrointerview at gmail dot com.

Q: Will you help promote my book, cause, thing?

Because we get so many of these requests, we rarely post them because otherwise all we would be doing is posting promos and requests for money and so forth. From time to time, though, we will post on these subjects but it is rare.

Q:   Why do you write your reviews in the form of a letter?

When Jayne and Jane first started the blog, they were going to write the letters to readers, like those in the front of many books.   Dearreader.com was taken but dearauthor.com was not.   So that is how we came to write reviews in the form of letters to authors.   The book reviews, though, are really for readers.   We don’t presume that an author would find our reviews helpful or useful because by the time the book gets to us, the book is done, published. The reviews, though, are meant to be conversation starters and are not intended to be read as literal letters written to the author.