Accolades from Kirkus Reviews
Jul 22, 2026 by C W Johnson, in Adventures in writing and publishing
, Reviews
, Science and Science Fiction
Kirkus Reviews is a major player in book reviewing, along with Publisher's Weekly (and of course the ever-shrinking book review sections of newspapers... remember those?...such as the NYT review of books). As I have mentioned before, I received a coveted starred review.
At the end of last year (remember last year? Me neither), A Life Full of Quarks was named one of 2025's best books, in the category of best indie literary fiction.
And now, I am a finalist for the first-ever Kirkus Indies Awards, in the category of... science fiction and fantasy. I do not expect to win, but it's nice to be nominated.
To be sure, I paid to be reviewed by Kirkus, though there was no guarantee of a starred review, or even a positive review, and some people have been unhappy with their reviews. (I did not have to pay more to be named one of the best books of 2025, however.) I did pay entry fees (for two categories, SF/fantasy and literary fiction, and you can see in fact it's impossible to know where my novel will land with any given reviewer) for the Indie Awards, but they list all the applicants and only the top 4% make the finals.
What Kirkus really wants is for me to pay a lot of money--literally a factor of 10 higher than the costs of the paid review and of the entry fees--for ads, in the hope it will attract buyers. (I would have to sell thousands of books to cover the costs of those ads, when I haven't even broken 200 so far. I don't believe an ad, in a magazine which itself has a circulation of only 15,000, with hundreds of books advertised in each issue; the numbers just don't look promising.) Now, curiously enough, after my book was named as a finalist, I did get a burst of sales...a whole nine books. Not bad, as I currently am only selling two or three books a month, but not enough to make up for the entry fees.
By the way, I had been advertising on Amazon, but the ratio of ad costs to sales has gotten so out of whack that I have stopped. I will look at other advertising venues, such as the Fussy Librarian, which is still a net loss but not by so much.
Truth is, I'm terrible at marketing and self-promotion.
At the end of last year (remember last year? Me neither), A Life Full of Quarks was named one of 2025's best books, in the category of best indie literary fiction.
And now, I am a finalist for the first-ever Kirkus Indies Awards, in the category of... science fiction and fantasy. I do not expect to win, but it's nice to be nominated.
To be sure, I paid to be reviewed by Kirkus, though there was no guarantee of a starred review, or even a positive review, and some people have been unhappy with their reviews. (I did not have to pay more to be named one of the best books of 2025, however.) I did pay entry fees (for two categories, SF/fantasy and literary fiction, and you can see in fact it's impossible to know where my novel will land with any given reviewer) for the Indie Awards, but they list all the applicants and only the top 4% make the finals.
What Kirkus really wants is for me to pay a lot of money--literally a factor of 10 higher than the costs of the paid review and of the entry fees--for ads, in the hope it will attract buyers. (I would have to sell thousands of books to cover the costs of those ads, when I haven't even broken 200 so far. I don't believe an ad, in a magazine which itself has a circulation of only 15,000, with hundreds of books advertised in each issue; the numbers just don't look promising.) Now, curiously enough, after my book was named as a finalist, I did get a burst of sales...a whole nine books. Not bad, as I currently am only selling two or three books a month, but not enough to make up for the entry fees.
By the way, I had been advertising on Amazon, but the ratio of ad costs to sales has gotten so out of whack that I have stopped. I will look at other advertising venues, such as the Fussy Librarian, which is still a net loss but not by so much.
Truth is, I'm terrible at marketing and self-promotion.