Submission Guidelines — Trusted Book Reviews
How to Submit Your Story and What We’ll Publish
Trusted Book Reviews are written by informed and experienced published authors from various backgrounds.
Would you like to contribute to the publication? The following information will help prepare your book review for submission. Follow these steps and stick to the Trusted Book Reviews Style Guide; your piece should be accepted. We review new submissions every Friday.
Trusted Book Reviews seeks writers with a clear and compelling voice. Our readers are curious about the books you love. Likewise, our readers value a review that warns them of a book they should avoid. We work hard to fill TBR lists with the best writing in various genres!
Check out these guidelines, and get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you.
1. What We Publish
Trusted Book Reviews accepts book recommendations from qualified and unique voices. Readers who explore multiple genres and read 52 or more books each year can often spot a good book.
Write your thoughts on the book and the overall feeling you were left with upon completion. Share your notes on story structure and plot elements, character development, point-of-view, writing craft, grammar and editing, overall reader experience, and emotional reaction to the story.
2. When You Publish on Trusted Book Reviews
You retain all rights to the review you submitted to Trusted Book Reviews. Want to republish the review on your website or blog? Go for it. But remember, once you publish a review with Trusted Book Reviews, it is to remain with the publication. We discourage you from removing an already-published review from the publication.
Trusted Book Reviews puts your review in front of a growing community of voracious readers on Medium.
We also promote each review on our social media accounts to broaden exposure to your thoughts and recommendations. Please follow us on those platforms.
Contact the Editor if you have more questions.
3. Before Submitting Your Story
Please follow these guidelines to ensure your story is well prepared for our publication.
a. Medium Profile
Complete your Medium profile with your headshot as the profile picture. Write a brief bio that tells readers who you are, what you like to read, and how you review books. Be sure to add external links to your website or social accounts.
b. Format
Adhere to Medium’s curation guidelines so that your review is formatted properly. Avoid massive chunks of text, which can lower your review’s readability.
Title your review in a way that tells readers exactly what they can expect from the review. Example — ‘This Book Is Great’ would be better written as ‘How Stephen King’s IT Uncovered Complex Coming of Age Issues Within Me.’
Be sure to use Title Case, capitalizing all major words. Use the Title Case Converter if you doubt how to create your titles.
The subtitle should be in sentence case. Do not end your subtitle with any punctuation marks.
Include a relevant (high-resolution and royalty-free) featured image. Give credit to the owner or creator of that image or photograph. We recommend Unsplash to find quality images that match the theme of your review.
When possible, gain permission from the Publisher and Author and provide credit for the book cover and author photograph.
c. Editing
Try your best to ensure your review is free of grammatical errors. Please use the free Grammarly Chrome extension to improve your review before submitting it to Trusted Book Reviews.
Once submitted, you permit the editors to revise any errors found in your review. The editors may correct them or send a message asking you to make corrections and resubmit. Trusted Book Reviews reserves the right to make minor grammatical edits so the review is error-free. If you prefer the editors not to make minor corrections to your review, you can submit and publish your review elsewhere.
d. Word limit
Trusted Book Reviews seeks thought-provoking book reviews that will serve readers well. The ideal word count is between 500 to 900 words. If you want to write a longer, more in-depth review, feel free to do so. When submitting a shorter review, ensure you still provide the reader some value for taking the time to read your review.
e. Medium Tags
Medium permits authors to use five topic tags for each review. At Trusted Book Reviews, we request three of the topic tags be Books, Book Review, and Fiction (or Nonfiction). Please include one topic tag based on the genre of the book being reviewed.
f. Including Affiliate Links
From Medium Rules:
You must disclose affiliate links or payment for a post. Affiliate links, such as a link to Amazon with your code, or any other link out where you will receive a commission or other value, are allowed in posts. But, you must disclose somewhere in the post that it includes affiliate links. If you have received payment, goods or services, or something else of value in exchange for writing a post, you must still disclose this fact in writing within your post (as per FTC Rules and Guides).
g. Short and Simple CTAs
If you want to include a call-to-action (CTA) at the end of your review, keep it short and straightforward. Limit the call-to-action to just one sentence, and ensure it is not aggressive.
h. Clickbait Rejection
Trusted Book Reviews seeks well-developed reviews that serve readers, filling TBR lists with the best writing in various genres.
Medium Staff provide their thoughts on clickbait:
In short, curators are looking for thoughtful, clearly written pieces that tell a compelling story, convey an interesting idea, or share a smart point of view. These can take many forms… We explicitly do not want to distribute misinformation, stories with clickbait headlines, stories that are primarily marketing a product or service, stories that use photos that the author doesn’t have the rights to use, or stories with excessive typos and errors.
Editors at Trusted Book Reviews uphold this standard.
4. Steps to Submit
New writers are added every Friday. Just complete the submission form.
Make sure your review meets the requirements of the Trusted Book Reviews Style Guide.
After you are approved as a Trusted Book Reviews writer, you can submit more reviews through Medium as they are completed. To do so, click the three dots in the top right of your review and choose “Add to Publication.”
Choose “Trusted Book Reviews” from the list and click “Save.”
Next, click the green “Submit” button beside the three dots. Once clicked, a prompt will appear asking you to provide (up to) five relevant topic tags. Trusted Book Reviews requests three of the topic tags be Books, Book Review, and Fiction (or Nonfiction). Please include one topic tag based on the genre of the book being reviewed.
Finally, decide if you want to put your review behind Medium’s paywall. Trusted Book Reviews recommends making your review eligible to earn money. You should also allow curators to recommend the review to a broader audience of readers on the topics you provided.
Trusted Book Reviews will handle all submitted reviews within three business days. If your review is rejected, Trusted Book Reviews will send a note explaining why. If your review could be improved through editing, an editor will try to provide some guidance. Trusted Book Reviews Editors will NEVER edit any part of your review (except grammatical errors) without your permission.
Medium provides more assistance in their article on adding a draft or post to publications.
For those writers new to the Trusted Book Reviews family — Welcome!
We look forward to reading your reviews and discovering what you believe readers should add to their TBR list.
All the best,
A.E. Jackson
Editor, Trusted Book Reviews
