Guide to Reviews at the BFS

To help us get the year started right, we’re highlighting some of the amazing work done by our BFS volunteers and the great opportunities our members can seize. Today, Adrian Fletcher takes our collective hand to entice us to the land of reviews.

Hello, my name is Adrian, although only schoolteachers and people who worked in banks when I was too young to be Mr Fletcher have ever called me that. I’m the new review editor for the BFS. 

To be honest, before Covid I hadn’t heard of the BFS. My first Fantasycon was in 2021. It was, for me, a chance to catch up with an old friend that lockdown meant I hadn’t seen in some time. I loved the experience and have been attending conventions regularly since.

Conventions are great, and Fantasycon may be the first thing that comes to mind when people think of the BFS. Hearing your favourite authors talk in panels is undeniably a special experience, but it’s not what I love about conventions. Talking to people about fantasy books is a genuine pleasure. Picking a next read can be hard, and nothing helps more than listening to someone speak with passion about the merits of a book they’ve read.

That is where reviews come in. Word of mouth will always be the surest way to promote a book. Recommendations from a friend “hit different.” Reviews are how the Society can spread the word about great books. When you put down a book that’s really spoken to you, the first thing you want to do is tell someone about it. Some books are too good not to be shared, and sitting down and discussing exactly what you loved about them brings you closer to the characters and story that meant so much to you.

The BFS exists, in part, to help British SFFH writers connect with readers—which also means helping readers find books they might enjoy. In my opinion, reviews are the purest expression of that goal. 

That said, we aren’t critics. We don’t score books out of 10, nor would we post a review of a book that our reviewer couldn’t find anything to enjoy in. The BFS is here to support the works that we love; there’s more than enough negativity in the world at the minute without us putting more out there. That’s not to say our reviewers won’t highlight a book’s flaws, if it has any. We want our reviews to be honest reflections of the reader’s experience, just that we aim for them to be at least balanced. If someone was to really not care for a book, then we prefer to not run a review it at all.

Get involved: join the list!

And we’re always open to new reviewers. You don’t have to have experience, enthusiasm for the genre is really the only prerequisite. There’s no commitment to reviewing for us, we don’t demand a certain number of reviews per month. Everyone involved is a volunteer, and we know life comes first, some of us even have lives of our own (not me, however.)

The only difference being on our reviewer list will make to your day to day life is that once a month you’ll receive an email with the list of books we have available for review, and if you like the look of any of them you can request a copy to read (sometimes ebook, sometimes hard copy, depending on the publisher), in exchange for writing a review.

(Photo by Roman Denisenko on Unsplash)

The book list itself is, as the name suggests, a list of books. Specifically, books that publishers have sent to us for review. Thanks to the amazing work of my predecessor, Sarah Deeming, we have a great relationship with publishers large and small. We get advanced copies of a whole host of upcoming releases, sometimes months in advance of the release. And they’re free! It’s sometimes a bit surreal. Of course, if a reviewer reads a book that’s not on the list, they’re more than welcome to submit a review for that as well. It’s not just new books that people love.

On a personal level, for so short a time in the role I’ve already had some deeply satisfying moments. One of the first friends I made at Fantasycon (four years ago, four!) is an author. After following their journey to publication with all the ups and downs that entails, we received a review copy of their debut novel. Being able to post that, and it going on to be one of the more viewed of the reviews in my tenure, was a real moment of satisfaction.

You don’t have to be on our list to submit a review though; there’s a link on the website that lets people both submit reviews they have written and request a review of their own work. If you have a one-off review you’d love to share with the world, then feel free to pop it on there. If you do have a book you’d like reviewed, it’s the same page with a different button; I’ll put the link at the end. Our only criterion for reviews is that we don’t currently accept self-published work, as the potential scope of work we could receive is just too much for our small volunteer team to handle. Filling out the form will send an email off to me, and I’ll come back to you on it.

In the coming months, there’ll be lots of reviews as always. I’ve seen catalogues from a lot of publishers and there’s so many exciting titles on there—it’s going to be a great 2025. From our side, we’ll also be looking to give reviewers a chance to share a bit more of themselves. We’re looking at having profiles on the website, for those reviewers who want them. They all do an amazing job for us, and we want to make sure they get the appreciation they deserve.

If you are interested in pitching or requesting a review, head here. That link also contains more information on what we look for in reviews, but if you have further questions you can always email me via reviews@britishfantasysociety.org.

Get to know the reviews editor’s taste in books

• Adrian’s favourite book of all time: Memories of Ice, by Steven Erickson (book 3 of the Malayan Book of the Fallen)
• Adrian’s favourite series: Wheel of Time

Don’t let that stop you from being part of the review crew, though! We review anything speculative, from full-on fantasy like these through to the quietest horror and the most surreal weird stuff you can handle. Get in touch with Adrian for a chat and see what’s possible.