Book Reviews

Our next book up for a Design Review is Waiting for Spring by R.J. Keller. Originally published in 2007, R.J. said in her email, “My book has been for sale for over a year. It’s printed by CreateSpace.” She designed and produced the book herself. Remember that you can click the images to see a full-size version.

Design Review—Cover

The cover of a novel is a special type of design in which the designer needs to accurately communicate the general feeling, tone, time period, or genre of the book without reverting to story telling. Here the author has relied […]

Well, it didn’t take long to get a submission. Brian Spaeth has gamely submitted his self-published book for a Design Review. I’ve attached his PDF including the front cover and first 58 pages so if you’d like to comment on the design you can download the sample by simply clicking the cover, or by using this link.

In his email, Brian says: “Disclosure: The typo on the cover is intentional. Bonus points if you can figure out what the front cover is of. All graphics and layout were done by me. Thanks – this is a great idea […]

I swear right now that everything your gonna read in here happened 100% true. Cauze when I used to look back at all this crap that went down with me, sometimes I wouldn’t even believe it myself. I used to trip a lot on shrooms and acid, plus get high off weed or hash in weird places which can mess up how your ass remembers shit. (Though shrooms can help you with other stuff, but I’ll tell you about that later.) The thing is, when you start writin’ down a story from your life, it totally makes you sort shit

Finders, Seekers, Losers, Keepers is a friendly, low-key novel that reads like a cross between a slightly obsessive diary and the script for a melancholy sitcom. The cover is positively adorable, the author photo oozes cheery goodwill, and the café flyer illustrations do a great job at setting the mood and making you feel like a part of the small community that lies at the heart of the novel.

Halia Frank is a middle school science teacher in a miniature New York hamlet. She’s something of a career loner, but she’s grown worse since an attempt at normalcy with a […]

David McGowan, the author of Homesteader: Finding Sharon, is a brave man. I reviewed rather unfavorably his previous novel, Partners, but as that novel showed promise, I wrote that I was looking forward to his next book.

Perhaps taking me up on a challenge, he sent Homesteader: Finding Sharon for review. It takes courage for an author to send a novel to the very reviewer who did not give unqualified praise to his previous book. But Mr. McGowan has done that, and for him it has paid off, because I really liked Finding Sharon. This novel is not […]

This first page of Jess C. Scott’s Eyeleash falls flat, and here’s why: the use of shortened language (“abt”), the suggestion that I’m about to read a series of random blog entries with no particular movement in any direction (“Rants raves and everything else”), and the immediate introduction to a narrator who believes her blog and herself are interesting enough to warrant warnings about sharing the material, which usually means the entries won’t actually be that interesting – or, not as interesting as the author suspects.

However, at the same time, what does lend some interest to the first page […]