Author and editor Justin Lee Anderson is launching a new service to bring indie authors with books to launch into the orbit of those “bookfluencers” who can help spread the word.
Way back in the dim and distant before times of 2018, I self-published my first book, Carpet Diem, after getting the rights back from the small indie press that initially published it in 2015. I figured I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing, having worked in small publishing companies across things like guidebooks, trade magazines and websites for most of my professional career as a writer, editor and proofreader.
(Photo by Blaz Photo on Unsplash)
And I did OK. I learned on my feet, and I’d been experimenting with Facebook ads while the book was still with the indie press, so I was not unhappy with the results. I think we sold around 11k copies with the indie press edition and I know we’re over 25k total now, which I think was not bad for a tiny debut novel by a total unknown.
I spent a lot of time researching reviewers and submitting Carpet Diem, and then The Lost War (2019), to blogs, with some success. But it was incredibly time-consuming. I really wanted some kind of affordable service that would just take the book and submit it to reviewers for me – knowing they were interested in reading in my genre. But I just couldn’t find anything like that.
Even back then, a germ was forming in my mind—that I couldn’t be the only one who would have appreciated and used that service.
Fast forward to 2025, and through a confluence of events, I found myself with the opportunity to create something to do exactly what I wanted back then. But first, I needed to know that reviewers would be into it too. So I spoke to a number of reviewers that I know and got their input—particularly Sarah Chorn and Esme Weatherwax—and then brought on board a designer to create the site I had imagined: BookMatch.
Author, meet reviewer
BookMatch is designed as a matchmaking site between indie/self-published SFFH authors and reviewers. Reviewers can sign up and create a profile that specifies which subgenres they’re interested in, along with other criteria like age ranges and whether or not they’re happy with sex in their books. And then they get an email once a week with blurbs and covers of new books matching their preferences, which they can download from the library if they’re interested in reviewing them. There is no commitment to review anything—we won’t be policing reviewers beyond periodically checking that they are actively reviewing, so that we don’t have people just signing up to get free books! As long as you’re a genuine reviewer, we want you in the BookMatch community.
For authors, it allows them to submit their book once, in one place, and then have it emailed out to reviewers who have expressed an interest in their genre. It is expressly NOT a paid review service—all we’re doing is making submitting books to reviewers easy and quick. You could do the same job yourself, we’re just offering to save you the time, for what I think is a genuinely affordable price—a lot more affordable for indies than the big site we all know about!
BookMatch is a fairly straightforward idea, but you’d by surprised how complicated it has been to design and create! However, we’re nearly there. We soft launched over the holidays to recruit reviewers to the community, which is actively ongoing while we do our final testing in the background to make sure everything works as intended when we launch fully.
Launching In 3…2…1…
My hope is to launch by the end of March, allowing for all the testing going well and getting a good spread of reviewers signed up to cover all the genres.
We already have over 120 reviewers signed up, including bloggers, bookstagrammers, podcasters and booktubers, with more coming in every week.
If you’re a reviewer of any genre of SFFH indie books, we’d love to have you. Please come check out the site at bookmatch.co.uk and let me know what you think. If you have any questions or suggestions, there’s a contact form on the website.
If you’re an indie/self-pub author, we’re not yet taking book submissions, but you can register to be notified when we open to that.
I’m hoping BookMatch will prove to be a way to help authors and reviewers find each other, and get more eyes on indie books that might otherwise go under the radar. The more people get involved, on both sides, the better it will work for everyone.
(Photo by Olena Bohovyk on Unsplash)
Leave a Reply