Episode 37: Victoria Sutherland on Reviews and Opportunities for Independent Publishers

Victoria Sutherland is the Founder and Publisher of Foreword Magazine, Inc., and Director of Children’s Books USA. She joins the BookSmarts Podcast to discuss how Foreword Magazine can help smaller, independent publishers with their marketing endeavors.

The mission of Foreword Magazine, Inc. is to help booksellers and librarians discover great books from indie presses through an artistic magazine dedicated to book reviewing. Victoria has spent many years of her career focusing on independent publishers and small press authors, and currently serves as Treasurer of the Independent Book Publishers Association. She discusses marketing trends that she’s discovered throughout her career as well as the process and positive outcomes of their book reviews.

Learn more about Foreword Magazine at forewordreviews.com, as well as their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter accounts.

Transcript

Joshua Tallent 

Hello and welcome to the BookSmarts Podcast where we talk about publishing data and technologies and send you away with some insights that will help you sell more books. I’m your host, Joshua Tallent. This week on the BookSmarts podcast, I’m talking with Victoria Sutherland, who is the founder, publisher of Foreword Magazine. Victoria. Thanks for joining me.

Victoria Sutherland 

Thank you for having me. I appreciate being here, Josh.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, it’s a great opportunity. I’d love to share with our audience, what Foreword Magazine does and talk a little bit about the work that you’re doing in the publishing world so why don’t we start off, actually, give a little bit of your background. How long have you been working in publishing? You obviously have been working at Foreword for a long time because you’ve, you know, you founded it. So, what’s your background? And also, what does Foreword Magazine do?

Victoria Sutherland 

Sure. I have a degree from Michigan State University in Communications and I started off selling advertising space for some regional trade magazines and lifestyle magazines early in my career, and fell into publishing because there was a packager in the town that I live who bought Small Press Magazine, which was started by Publishers Weekly, in the early 90s, I think, was bought by Britt Bell and his wife, which ran a small publisher out of Rhode Island and the wife died unexpectedly, and they were selling Small Press Magazine and so the packager that I worked for asked if I would like to come on board and help them sell ads and be the publisher of that magazine and I saw it was a great opportunity to really start, you know, focusing on independent presses, the publishing industry had been tepidly, watching Self Publishers, you know, with the onset of desktop computers, but there had been some more established publishers around for the 10 or 15 years prior to that, and there wasn’t a good resource for small presses to get recognized and Small Press Magazine was doing great reviews and a trusted source for librarians and booksellers, on which books to pick up for their stacks. The person I was working for took Small Press Magazine in a direction that I didn’t think was good, long term, and so a couple of other women editors and I decided to start our own publication when he rejected our offer to purchase Small Press Magazine and that’s when forward was born. It was 1998, April 1st, we packed up our computers from home and walked him down the street to a little office space above an ice cream shop and as I’m sure many small presses have started on sawhorses, with old doors put on top. One of our first purchases was a fax machine and that’s how we let people know back then that we were open for business. So Anne Stanton and Marty Lenk were my two co-founders but after a little while, they decided to sort of pursue some other interests and I’m not sure if that was, you know, the stress of running a business and I was the only one who actually refinanced my house to make sure that we stayed in business and so, that’s, you know, in a nutshell, how I ended up being the the only owner of the publication. But we’ve really, I feel like we came at a great time not very many independent presses were getting coverage in the regular trade magazines and so we just went with it. We were monthly at first, went down to quarterly, now we’re bi-monthly, but we are, you know, I like to call myself a media company. We have a digital publication for people who prefer that. We also have marketing services for people editing, and representation at some trade shows overseas. Our whole mission was to provide an opportunity for independent presses to have the same sort of, a level playing field that the larger houses were in a cooperative sort of situation and that’s been the premise of our success, I think.

Joshua Tallent 

That’s great. That’s an interesting story and it’s obviously the independent publishing has grown tremendously since you started Foreword magazine. So, what have you seen as trends in the last couple of years in the way that independent publishers are handling marketing and reviews and these kinds of things?

Victoria Sutherland 

Well, um, in terms of marketing, I think a lot of pressure is being put on social media to help them sell books. I’m still standing by the side of the road watching to see what happens because I’m not sure a lot of; I think it’s driving consumers to books that they might not have otherwise heard. I always felt like the trade was still worthwhile reaching out to. I mean, bookstores and librarians are setting the tone for culture in their communities. They’re places for gathering and they’re the ones who are recommending books to read to their patrons. And so a 300 copy sale from a large library in Houston or Los Angeles is still a big deal to me. So while I do see a lot of independent presses trying to focus on some social media, I hope they, I hope they don’t dump all of their monies or efforts into that, because I think that it’s, it’s not as if; it’s a nice complement to what they do to the trade as well. It’s got to be the whole package. In terms of reviews, I mean, it really, reviews are a commodity now in terms of the the world, the what’s in restaurants, and hotels, and airline services and books, everybody wants to see a review of the product or the book, or whatever it is, the place that they’re staying, or the restaurant they’re going to, before they make a decision. And so the value of reviews continues to only increase in my mind. And we do long form reviews, which is different from some of the other trade journals. They mostly do, you know, our small annotations are about 100 words, and recommend the book or don’t recommend the book. But we feel like, since the beginning, we’ve put a lot of money into or we’ve invested in paper quality and whitespace and making sure that the magazine was a piece of art. And as well as the words, you know, in the reviews being something that they can enjoy for, you know, on their coffee table or on their train ride home or, you know, for a little bit longer than just a resource that they have at their desk at work.

Joshua Tallent 

I think your point about marketing is really well made that, you know, there’s a lot of focus on certain types of marketing, like you said, you know, social media and things like that, but only a certain percentage of the population is going to engage with that. There’s still a need for other types of outreach to people and visibility of your books or any other product honestly, in front of the eyes of people and different types of people engage in different ways. So yeah, I think you’re; I think that point is really well made and something that a lot of independent publishers that I’ve talked to are just not understanding. So it’s good to know that there’s other voices saying that that’s, that’s an important piece of this.

Victoria Sutherland 

One of our recent endeavors was putting a conference together at the American Library Association this year called Library Insight Summit. And it was a gathering of librarians from across the country and the Chicago area to talk about what they look for in books and book reviews, you know, and book reviews are still really key for them. I’m sure you’re seeing this too. The metadata in their NetGalley and Edelweiss and all the accounts is also very important. So, I guess my recommendation is to just really figure out who your target market is, and make sure that those people are getting, you know, if you want it to be people in consumers who are shopping at bookstores and patronizing libraries, then make sure that the librarians and booksellers know about your book.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, yeah, that’s important. So, with Foreword, how many reviews do you typically have in a magazine? And what’s, you said, there’s obviously whitespace, you’re trying to make it long form and something more readable, that obviously also limits the number of reviews you could do in the same space. So, what do you take as your approach to that in publishing the magazine?

Victoria Sutherland 

I’m not going to speak on behalf of my Editor in Chief Michelle Shingler. But I’ve heard her say this a number of times, we’re trying to make sure that some underserved voices are being heard in terms of diversity, and LGBTQ and authors who might not, who are publishing in categories that are not very common. But we also have to make sure that we’re satisfying their interest in what is coming from more established presses as well. Fiction and nonfiction, about 125 per issue, so it’s not very many. We have category close ups that are genre specific in each issue, and we always include graphic novels and children’s picture books as well. Those aren’t quite as long as the long form reviews but those are hot topics for librarians especially who are trying to make sure that the graphic novels are age appropriate and the children’s books. There’s so many coming out. We want to make sure that they’re getting a good offering from independent presses. We also do poetry, which is not very commonly covered in trade magazines anymore. But we feel strongly about the art of poetry and so we want to make sure that that is getting some recognition and appreciating those presses who continue to publish poetry. We’re also spending a lot of time doing translations, and introducing some great works from overseas to American markets. The key is they have to have some distribution set up in the United States; it’s important for our librarians and booksellers to make sure that they can easily order the books from it and get it on their shelves.

Joshua Tallent 

So, what’s the process then? Working with publishers and working with, you know, authors or anybody else? What’s the process that people go through to submit a book for review potentially, or that whole, that whole thing.

Victoria Sutherland 

We require, because we make sure that reviewers read the book, three to four months in advance of the publication date. So right now we’re looking at November, actually, I think that deadline is passed for our November, December issue, we’re looking at January, February publication dates. We will take submissions, since COVID, most of the trade magazines are taking submissions via digital file, which makes things a lot quicker. We, she would appreciate a tip sheet or a sell sheet attached to the book submission that will help her very quickly figure out, make sure that the ISBN is there, see what the pub date is. Get an idea of what the book is about and see if it fits in her, you know, spreadsheet of what we have to cover that month and then she’ll spend some time looking through the book and making sure that the writing, because we only review books that we can recommend to libraries, we don’t want to include a book that isn’t going to meet our standards. And sometimes the reviewer will send the book back and say I don’t think that this is something that you guys should cover. And we’d say, okay, thank you for letting us know, pay them a reader’s fee. But we unfortunately, because we’re so small, we don’t have a tracking system for publishers to watch their book go through our system. But if your book is chosen for review, we do let the publisher know because at that time, we’ll start getting cover art and making sure that the reviewer has all the resources that they need to make a good judgment of the book. Then we have a layer, you know, three layers of editing and a couple of layers of editing after the magazine is laid out. So unfortunately, a lot of people are a little bit upset about the timeframes that we have with trade publishing, but librarians and booksellers are insistent on having information prior to the publication date so that any publicity that happens once you get the book released on radio or interviews and newspapers and things when the consumers are coming to the store, they’ve got it ready on the shelves or in the libraries. And they don’t, you know, they haven’t they’re like where’s this book? I’ve never heard of it before. They have heard of it.

Joshua Tallent 

A little bit of an order of operations that just needs to be in place. Yeah, that makes sense.

Victoria Sutherland 

Most publishers, most established publishers have us on their galley list, you know, where we automatically get everything that they come out with. As you may or may not know and or may or may not want to talk about, we are the company that originated a fee for review service in 2001. That was about three years after we opened our doors. And it was simply because we were getting so many submissions of great books that we couldn’t cover in the magazine because we were limited by space that we said, what, look why aren’t we giving these people a chance to get their book reviewed because we know how important it is to the trade if they pay us for our services. And, as you can imagine, there was a lot of uproar in the industry when that happened but I try not to smile too much when I see that all of our competitors who were giving us the hardest time are now all doing fee for Review Services. And here’s the most important factor of that fee for reviews service or any trade reviews. We all license our reviews to the wholesale databases, where librarians and booksellers shop. So, Bowker, Baker & Taylor, Ingram’s iPage, Cengage, EBSCO. You know, dozens more all receive our reviews and update a file once a month from us. And, for instance, if a library patron comes in and says you have zero books on martial arts or nothing that’s up to date, a librarian can go to the database at Ingram or Bowker or what have you that wherever they shop and call up the code, the BISAC code, and all of the books that have been reviewed go to the top of the list. So, your chances of getting your book bought are higher if your book has been reviewed by one of these trade publications that license the reviews to the trade. And for me, that’s, that’s worth the fee in and of itself, just getting access into that database.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah. So, what percentage of the books that you’ve review are paid review versus just a submission that someone sent in?

Victoria Sutherland 

I think, well, you know, in the magazine, they’re all free, we only review books that have been submitted to us at and those are no charge, probably 70% of them are free, and 30% of them are paid.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah. And that makes sense. If you’re, especially if you’re a smaller publisher, and you don’t have as many titles, or you’re starting out and you think this title really needs to get some visibility, it would make sense to try to get it to better to the top of the list and put some effort behind it.

Victoria Sutherland 

That’s right. And you know, especially because we didn’t not choose your book, because it wasn’t very good. We just didn’t have the space for it. And so, you know, in my dreams, I was imagining a publicity meeting happening every Monday morning and saying this one, this one, and this title got picked up by these trade publications last week, let’s pay for a review for these because they’re just as important to us and the prices, you know, we they need a review. So, it’s, you know, whatever people can take it or leave it, I have no, I’m not here to convince people that fee for reviews are where it’s at. I think it fills a void. A service fills the void that was necessary. And because now, you know, when we first started, there were only 55,000 titles coming from independent process, it’s millions. Now, how do you get noticed for things like that, plus, another option for this is if your book is not; if you’re a first time Author Publisher, which we deal with sometimes, and you’re not quite sure how the trade is going to respond to your book, here’s great feedback on your manuscript, before you even pay the money to have it printed, we’re going to give you an idea of the development didn’t happen very well, the editing, copy editing was bad, the copyright page isn’t set up properly. So fix those mistakes before you go to press.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, that’s great. And I think that’s a really, like you said, with the number of independent presses the number of independent titles that are being produced now, having those resources available, and being able to get not just the feedback, but also to know that your book will now have that review and be able to show up higher on the list. It’s obviously a kind of a no brainer for a publisher.

Victoria Sutherland 

Yeah, anecdotally, we don’t really review textbooks, but we did do a science book that had you know, was a very obscure topic that we actually had a reviewer who could handle the subject matter, do the book. And he came up to us at a trade show afterwards and said, nobody was touching my book until I paid for this review from you guys. And I got an order of 300 copies. Because, you know, it was reviewed. So that in of itself was you know, confirmation or affirmation for us to keep up with that side of the business. And frankly, we just, you know, it helps for all of us. It’s a decent enough revenue stream that we have, we have to keep it because the advertising dollars are drying up as we speak and so in order to support a print publication, we need to have several streams of revenue coming in.

Joshua Tallent 

That makes sense. So to finish us out, I’m curious if you have any recommendations for publisher, independent publishers, who are looking at okay, we’ve got, we’re approaching the market with a new title, maybe it’s out of kind of the norm for us. And we’re thinking about not just reviews, but maybe marketing or maybe, you know, other things, what are some trends that you’re seeing, or some thoughts that you have, that you would say, do this first, here’s the one or two things that I would recommend you do as an independent publisher to really make sure your book is successful.

Victoria Sutherland 

The number one suggestion I have is that quality is always going to be king. We, I don’t care how unique your subject matter is or how different, how necessary it is. Librarians and bookstores and even readers are going to reject books that aren’t well written. So that’s number one. Always. We have to just keep keeping on with putting good books out. I would check in with libraries or podcasts or library listservs or bookstores and see what’s, you know, because I heard, we heard at our conference that young adult books are still very popular, you know? So, try to publish books that the market wants graphic novels, books for boys that are like normal boy books, we heard, diverse titles that are written by diverse authors Not, not I don’t know how to say this kindly not, you know, white person’s running publishing houses saying we have to put diverse books out. I mean, we want to give the diverse publishing population a chance to publish great books and getting into the marketplace too. What else, you know, I guess I just keep going back to quality people are always going to, your book is going to resonate as long as the quality is good, and they’re not feeling like they’re picking up something that isn’t packaged perfect, you know, as professionally as it possibly could, including editing. And design inside.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, that’s good. 100% agree. So, Victoria, thanks for taking some time to chat today. Where can people follow what you’re doing online?

Victoria Sutherland 

Well, our website is forewordreviews.com for-word, like the foreword of a book; you can’t even believe how many times people misspell that. I’m on LinkedIn. And Foreword also has Facebook and Twitter accounts. So forewordreviews.com will direct you to all of those.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, we’ll put links in the show notes. Thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Victoria Sutherland 

Thanks again for your time.

Joshua Tallent 

That’s it for this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please leave a review or rating on Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast. And also please share the podcast with your colleagues. If you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at joshua@firebrandtech.com. Thanks for joining me and getting smarter about your books.