The name of the game is research

I just had an e-mail back-and-forth with an author, a former Spokane resident who has just seen his children’s book get published, who isn’t happy with me. He can’t understand why I am not jumping at the chance to “review” his book. “I guess I figured that since I was raised in Spokane that an article would be ‘wanted,’ ” he wrote.

Well, I can offer a couple of reasons. One, The Spokesman-Review in all but a few cases doesn’t review self-published books. Too many of them cross my desk – dozens, actually – and the editing standards are, for the most part, nonexistent. And while the book in question here is being published by PublishAmerica , a publishing house that can’t actually be described as a self-publishing vanity press because it does offers its authors a contract and a modest advance – $1, for example – it’s the next best thing . Again, editorial standards mostly don’t exist.

Second, these days anyone can see his or her book go to print. I can show you a couple of hundred books or more sitting near my desk, each written by a Pacific Northwest author , all of which have been sent to me for “review.” That’s unlikely to happen when, as opposed to the Oregonian , for example, we run only a single books page per week. And on that page we have to squeeze the New York Times best-seller list, one or two short reviews or book-related articles (in which names such as Stephen King , Toni Morrison and John Irving are likely to be mentioned) and my books column – in which I try to list every reading and signing and other literary-related event set to take place in the immediate Inland Northwest .

I explained some of this to him. The rest I left unsaid, expecting him to consult one of the many books on the market about how to correctly market his work – including how to approach your average newspaper books editor.