Podcast

Transcript

John Goodwin (00:07): Hello, and welcome to the Writers and Illustrators of the Future Podcast. This is John Goodwin, your host. This podcast is dedicated to the aspiring writer and artist and will provide inspiration and tips from top professionals in the field. If you’ve been listening to this podcast or are new to it, I thank you very much. I would also appreciate if you took a moment to follow on whatever platform you listen to your podcasts.

Writers of the Future is one of the longest-running writing competitions in the world now celebrating over four decades of providing a helping hand, as initially conceived by L. Ron Hubbard. Today’s guest is Kimberly Fakih. She has been a professional book reviewer for PW, Kirkus, SLJ, and LJ. So that’s PW‘s Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, SLJ is School Library Journal, and LJ is Library Journal, and a lot of newspapers when there used to be papers that reviewed books under the banner of Media Source, owner of Library Journal and School Library Journal.

Kimberly has created Open Shelf, a new review service that will help an author deal with one of the biggest problems needing to be solved, discoverability. With that said, welcome Kim.

Kimberly Fakih (01:14): Thank you so much John for having me. This company is four months, five months old, and we’ve already got it up and running as a live site where we’re meeting lots of new authors and illustrators via their submissions. I come from a background of pretty much centralized control over the whole publishing process with the big five. That was how I started many, many years ago, and I’ve just seen this moment in time become the perfect explosion of resources for writers on social media, new avenues for publicizing their titles, and I hope Open Shelf Reviews is another way to decentralize the control and get more voices out there. I just have such high hopes.

John Goodwin (02:01): That’s great. Cause that’s a real problem that authors have to deal with. In 2025, it was over four million, like I think four million one hundred thousand ISBNs were issued in the United States alone. So ISBN is the international standard book number. And not every book has to have it, but if they don’t have it, you can’t take it much further than the trunk of your car to move the product. So with that many books being published.

That’s just last year, 2025. I don’t know what the numbers are going to be for 2026, but it’s a lot of books. And that’s just one year. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t count the previous, you know, years that are also still being carried by booksellers. So discoverability, once you have a book, is I think the biggest hurdle to be overcome as an author, as an artist, as any creative person. But right now, we’re talking about books.

So, if you can take a few moments and just discuss the different types of reviews and their significance. Cause you know, we have Amazon, Goodreads, Social Media, Influencer, and the trades.

Kimberly Fakih (03:09): Well, I love it that there’s so much coverage of books, sort of any way you can get to it. I appreciate I am also an author of a book that came out in 2023. And the impact of the Goodreads and the Amazon reviews on that book were really, really great. But what got me into libraries and bookstores was the reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal have a couple of reviews where booksellers…

John Goodwin (03:41): Because that means, I was gonna say because in order to make it into libraries, you need to have a pro review. I mean that’s I guess that’s one of their benchmarks you need to have. It doesn’t matter necessarily that’s good or bad, you just have to have been pro reviewed in order for them to consider you a buyer, acquisition librarian to consider you for a library. Is that still correct?

Kimberly Fakih (04:06): That’s still correct and it’s gotten so just to go back a little bit, libraries always had to be able to justify their purchases, but they were much more they had much more autonomy, librarians and selection departments for doing that. And as there’s been a rise in censorship encroaching on book banning, encroaching on real drives in certain parts of the country.

To throw out books based on one person’s opinion. Librarians have had to use the reviews to make the case for acquiring the books. And it used to be one review was enough and then it was two reviews and now they need coverage in two to three publications just to be able to approach the people who are approving their purchases for the, or to be able to defend the book after the purchase with their community.

Work you know, whoever’s on school boards, who’s, whoever’s on community boards. So the review has become more important at the same moment that there’s been an explosion, as you say, of so many books being published. And beautiful places, you know, in all due respect for the company I work for, Library Journal, School Library Journal, the Hornbook, Junior Library Guild, they can’t cover more than eleven thousand to fifteen thousand books a year. And you just said four million.

So we’re just really on board with that what you said, discoverability. There’s so many layers to discoverability, but one of the most important for the self-published author or the small press is to just get a review, as you say, good or bad, to just be on the map. It’s sort of like I had a small business at with the rise of Google. I had a very small business and they came to me and said, Do you want to be on our maps? And I said, No, people find us.

But when I saw how people were moving through the world with their Google Maps in their hands and we weren’t on the map. We weren’t on the map. We weren’t a business that counted. Now I understand in a way as never before how the review matters to the small, the small publications.

John Goodwin (06:16): Yeah. That that’s really good. And it’s also for those of you listening, like it’s a problem having thin skin as a baby writer, you know, and they didn’t love it. They didn’t just all these outflow of love for my story, my book, my you know, my creation, my baby, whatever you want to call it. And then so they said, Well, it was I guess it was the first try, so okay, hope they hope to come back again or I hope they didn’t give up their day job and you know they just you know, and they can get really, really, really introverted and very, you know, gun shy about trying to come out again because it’s a very personal thing writing a book. And unless you’ve actually done, unless you’ve actually poured your soul into whatever you’re creating, even if it’s fiction, it’s still your create. Those are your characters.

You’re, as in one of the things, one of the creative writing teachers, one of the I’ve talked to several, one of their favorite L. Ron Hubbard stories is a book called Typewriter in the Sky.

And that’s one where, you know, it’s the writer’s creating these characters and his best friend gets pulled into the story and he knows how his how the villain’s going to end, you know, every time he gets killed off and he’s like, No, I don’t want to die. But then it’s just the whole thing of like the Typewriter in the Sky, you know, so that’s the author is the God of that story. You know, so when you pour it out, it’s like if someone gives you some grief over it, it can be a very rough thing. So I think you need to understand too that if especially if a pro review decides to take you on and review your book, even if it’s a negative review, they took you on and they read your book. You know, so that’s its own level of recognition. People need to realize that.

Kimberly Fakih (08:14): It’s really true. As I said, I’ve worked in reviews for a long time and at Publishers Weekly the goal was to kind of be on the side of the advertisers, the publishers. I mean, you didn’t want to alienate the very audience that was supporting your business. At Kirkus, we heard from librarians that they loved getting Kirkus. They sat down and they read it cover to cover for the snark and the sarcasm and the sort of evisceration of the authors.

I couldn’t do that in children’s books because I’d been at Harper Collins, I’d been at Houghton, Mifflin, Tickner, and Fields. I knew all the thousands of people, right down to the printing presses that had gone to work on that book, not just the author, not just the illustrator. And so by the time I got to this time to School Library Journal, it was my whole goal was to offer constructive criticism to the reviewers. They’re really good.

They’re from an institutional background, educators, you know, very experienced people, but you know, sometimes they love to make a point and it comes out with a little too much negativity. And the idea for Open Shelf Reviews is, all right, we can be constructive about our feedback, but you’re not taking someone to task for having a dream and the passion to put it onto the page.

You have to respect the whole offering from beginning to end from the moment that they had the idea till the moment they got brave enough to put it to Ingram Spark or to go out somewhere else to get it published or to put it through Amazon KDP. Whatever they’ve done is a huge act of faith in their own idea. And I never want to tear that down. I want people to have something they can work with as a marketing idea, as a niche, as a I don’t know, an objective for finding their readership.

There’s no point in taking people down. They’ve put so much work into this whole thing and it’s just gotta be respected.

John Goodwin (10:14): I think so too. And right now I’m even all the more an advocate of what you are about with the advent of AI books. I’m definitely two thumbs down on AI books. And you know, you take a look at somebody and they’ve got a dream. They’ve like they bother to go down and write something, they they’ve got some thoughts, some ideas, and they write it down and they’re creating and they want to be able to bring it to fruition.

Their imagination, their storytelling. And that needs to be reinforced. That needs to be validated all the more. So right now as you’ve got the Johnny come lately is the ones that, you know, I don’t want to put any effort into it. And they just, okay, I’m gonna give it some prompts and here’s my book. Well it’s not their book. You know, and so I the more that people like yourself can be there and we’ll get into like maybe I’m putting my foot in the middle of it right now.

But I’m all in favor of people that want to go the extra mile and work out a story. Like what we do with Writers of the Future is it’s I mean, we get a lot of entries. We get thousands of entries every quarter. And so when it starts, you know, a person will get the worst they’re going to get is an email saying, Thank you very much for submitting. Please submit again. They’re not going to get something that says, This is awful, this is pretentious, this is just like, Thank you very much. Please take advantage of our free online workshop.

You know, follow the podcast, all these different things you’re told. And then once they hit the top 10 percentile, they start getting an honorable mention. And they’ll get a certificate saying, Congratulations, your Honorable Mention. And then up from there until they win or pro out.

And it’s a process to become a writer, you know, and you know, it’s if someone wants to, I don’t have a problem with like saying, look, it they should have taken time to get it properly edited or properly typeset, you know, books are don’t really get printed on color paper. So maybe you just want to use, the people using white paper and black ink for a long time. Maybe just keep with that. You know, because we get all kinds of stuff. But what you have to offer there with because the last one of the last categories we were talking about or that didn’t sense, is paid reviews, because that’s Kirkus, that’s Book Life, and Open Shelf. So tell me about that. Let’s discuss that and the advantages of that and to dispel because it’s kinda like fallen, maybe it’s coming out of it now, like the vanity presses.

Kimberly Fakih (12:57): So the vanity presses, sure, well see there’s something that’s happening I’ll get to the part about paid reviews in a minute, but what I’ve seen hybrid publishing is sort of the move away from vanity publishing to hybrid publishing where the author and the publishers openly share the costs, the author puts money up front but retains close to hundred percent of royalties, while the hybrid publisher is someone with real experience in the field, who’s seen a lot in publishing, who understands marketing, who understands publicity, who understands the reason to not have typos, the reason to make the book, you know, page count is not everything. You don’t need a six-hundred-page book, you need legible type and page numbers and things like that.

And so the Vanity Publishers really set a precedent for letting people think of their books as their own projects that they can have a certain amount of control over. And now there’s been a move to hybrid and then now people are just putting it together by themselves. You know, they’re just figuring it out with all the services that are out there.

John Goodwin (14:11): I wasn’t trying to be disparaging about the vanity because vanity is, it’s morphed over from being this vanity thing to now it’s being self-indie published. So it’s taken on a new thing. I had Paige Allen, who’s the director of Spark. Yeah. So that was fun. And you know, people like her and yourself are just really trying to take that extra mile to help the new writer, the aspiring writer.

Kimberly Fakih (14:25): I listen.

So back in when I first started in publishing, because I’m really old, there were secretaries who it was it I would get a pile of envelopes and honestly the promise in those envelopes, you just opened up every single one and thought, is this gonna be the next Marie Sendok? Is this gonna be the next Shell Silverstein? And not all of them were those breakthroughs. I mean William Joyce came in over the transom.

A lot of famous people have come in that way. But there were hand typed letters. There was never a form letter. There were people on IBM Selectric saying, I’m sorry that your book is not right for us at this time. We wish you all the best, Harper and RoW publishers. There was nothing mean about it. It was just this isn’t gonna work, but keep going, you know, keep reading. Now everything’s automated and so that, you know, and people just don’t even get an answer about whether or not they’ve been accepted.

So, in the same time we have people just getting fed up and wanting to do it themselves and figuring out all the steps to publishing a book. And I feel as if it’s a real leveling of the playing field for in and the stigma has mostly gone away or is coming we hope Open Shelf Reviews helps with that. To get discovered, to pay for discovery, to guarantee yourself a review is just a way of opening one more gate, getting over one more hurdle.

On the way to finding your readers. It’s a match. We have to figure out how to make that match. And so, yes you’re paying and we understand that’s still a barrier, but it’s also a way for us to be sustainable and still allow all those new voices in to get them on the map, to hopefully get them on the way to seeing true sales of their books.

John Goodwin (16:28): Yeah, I think it’s I remember when Kirkus first started announcing…. Were they the first ones that went paid reviews as well on top of their…

Kimberly Fakih (16:37): I think so because I was there in ’95 when they were first talk, maybe ‘97. They were talking about it and then they did it after I left.

John Goodwin (16:44): Yeah. I remember when it first came out, I like, I had a very negative aspect of that because I was like, I work hard to get my reviews. You know, I spent a, I made many trips to New York and I’d get with people and I meet with the editors and I really worked a lot at PW. They jokingly gave me my own desk because I went so frequently. And then I went to LJ and I’d go there. It was like, I was I did it and at LJ, I forget his last name, Mike. He was the audio review editor.

And super nice guy and he wouldn’t give our audiobooks to anybody else. He wanted to do himself because he liked them so much. We had, they were like radio theater. That was, we were ahead of the curve on that. And he’d tell amazing stories. He’d go outside in New York to listen to the next CDs that have been sent to him to review and he’d light up a cigar, sit on his back porch, and then all of a sudden, you know, no, it’s raining.

And then he looked out and the sky is blue and clear and it was like it was the audio book because it was just yeah, totally immersive with our sound effects. And he just every one of them he reviewed. We had so many reviews that we had, ’cause we had eighty books that we put out within a few years of all of L. Ron Hubbard’s pulp fiction books, which were only at the time they were only ever released as magazine articles. So then we publish them as books. Because I met so many times with all the publishers and editors in LJ and PW.

And I got a few done with SLJ, but mostly it was just LJ. And they said, Okay, okay, okay. It’s a book. It’s a book. So we’ll review. And it went really, really well. But the point is that when Kirkus came out, you know, man, this is you’re selling their soul, you know, because Yeah. You know, but then as a num…, this it’s a problem. You have so many books coming out and it kept on increasing.

It wasn’t just like, you know, just the same number of books each year. They kept on growing and growing and growing. And then there was, you know, other pay-for-hire type reviews. But I think one thing that’s important with Open Shelf, you bring a lot of street cred to the company. You’ve got your decades of experience as a review editor with all these publications, having worked with the Big Five, having done so much stuff with it before. It’s different.

And you take a look at some I don’t want to pay for a review, but yet you’re willing to spend however many hundreds or thousands of dollars on Facebook, on Instagram, on Twitter or on X, YouTube to make videos, to make all these different things and promote it for discoverability. So if you can get something that will potentially get you into a library into Ingram to take your books, that’s way better.

Kimberly Fakih (19:36): I think of it as a marketing expense, you know, I think of it as a solid way to market your book to people who are right there waiting to find out about you. There’s one of the key parts of a librarian’s job, a bookseller’s job is to find what they’re going to stock. And this is supposedly, we hope, a way that, you know, it’s a sort of a shortcut.

You don’t have to worry about your followers on Facebook or Instagram or Threads or wherever you’re publicizing your book and buying the ads. We are front and center. And well first I want to say that your thing about your yeah, the first thing I want to say is I understand that feeling, that sort of that feeling of I’ve worked so hard to get my books out.

And now, you know, everybody can do it or something like that. I mean, I used to be really proud of being a great speller. I used to be really proud of being a good writer who got published in all these, you know, I have eight books out and children’s books. And you know, I was really proud of this. And then I saw people doing it either themselves or I saw people being writers on social media and thinking they’re writers now and I’m saying that with open quotes and closed quotes. Sure. And then you just sort of, I don’t know, you just go away and you say, finally everybody can sort of do their thing without all this judgment and see how far they get and they’re actually in their way more than anybody else’s. So the writer gets to make the decision. Is this review going to be good for me? I’ll do it. I’ll pay for it. If they don’t want to, don’t do it. Just don’t do it. But at least you feel a little bit like you have that alternative to maybe some of the other ways.

And it’s a finite amount of money, we think, for what you’re getting back, which is to help the lifetime of your book, to help it have a good shelf life, an open shelf life.

John Goodwin (21:34): Exactly. And I think people listening to this if you have a book now do you take backlist as well to review?

Kimberly Fakih (21:44): We are, we are. Yeah.

John Goodwin (21:46): Good. So as a published author, you can do your social media and it’ll have a shelf life of depending on how much you’re involved, of a day, maybe you can make something really good with paid promotions, make it go for a week or a month, but then it just gets buried down there and it’s and if it doesn’t have a whole lot of engagement.

Then the algorithm for Facebook or Instagram or whatever social platform you have isn’t going to feed it anymore. So you have a problem with that. Whereas if you’ve got a good review of your book, it’s timeless. You can put it on your next cover. You can put it with, on your A plus page on Amazon. You can stick it there on Goodreads.

And it’s something that you’ll have that will continue to sell your book as going…. We have with our westerns, we have our little backdrops that we do. We have these great reviews from True West magazine. We put ‘em up there and people’s like, wow if you like Louis L’Amour, Zane Gray, you’ll love L. Ron Hubbard. When we go to the Western shows, it’s just, we sell just bucket loads of books from that, you know, review. And it’s just they’re priceless, a good review if you actually use that as part of your marketing program, it’s just amazing on your promotion that you do to librarians, you know, in addition to being on the magazine or however they consume that review as a librarian. But people just need to realize, and I got excited about, that’s why I was so, that’s why I’m maybe a bit talking too much.

Kimberly Fakih (23:34): You’re not. That’s usually my problem, so go.

John Goodwin (23:36): Is that you have a real-life opportunity to get someone who’s a known and accepted voice as a review editor saying something about you. And maybe she’s not going to say, This is the best book since, you know, whatever you want to be able to say is as your favorite book. But if she says something that extols some type of virtue about it, or something that that makes someone like, well, I should check this out.

Or I see this is, this is a growing author, I should, you know, maybe check them out and keep on looking for them. You need something like that if you’re gonna, again, over four million ISBNs last year alone, and this year quite possibly be over five million. So it’s a real important thing. And then also it, do you have any particular, because I talked about briefly at the beginning, do you have any particular policy on AI books?

Kimberly Fakih (24:33): Okay, so that’s really a great question. We were, we have said that we won’t have AI writing, but we don’t make it a submission, we don’t make it part of the submission, but it’s the authors agreement. In the author’s agreement people have to say whether or not there is AI there or not and how much it can be used for the back matter, it can be used for the table of contents, it can you know, it can be used for indexing or any of those things.

But the narrative itself, we say in the agreements, cannot be constructed by AI. And I don’t even know what my sister publications are doing about AI yet. I’ve tried to sort of build this without looking over my shoulder and sort of without, but this is just such a good question, as AI becomes more and more legible, readable, editable.

You know, it’s just, I hope everybody’s going to stay transparent about it. I think that’s the only way culture can survive is if we at least know what’s AI and what’s not. There was a man who wrote us a few days ago about illustrations. He said, these are illustrations I created but enhanced with AI, but all under my own supervision. Great. We’re probably going to let that go through as a picture book, but the reviewer will have to come in.

On the value of that or not. And then that’s just going to be neutral feedback. It will be up to someone purchasing that book to decide if they want that book in their library or in their book to sell or not. It’s not it’s really not me, for me to say, no, no, no. It’s for the reviewer to assess it. And to your point about blurbs and quotes and all the usable parts, we hope to create evergreen feedback for that author that they can use on marketing materials now or in the future. They can start a conversation when they’re trying to pitch a book signing at their local bookstore to say, This is what you know the media source company Open Shelf Review said about my book. You know, they’re aligned with these other sister publications. And to have a feeling that someone has seen them with no scales on their eyes, just assessed and read and provided the information about their book. And I want people to feel good about it. I don’t want anybody to go home and never write again. That’s just not good for anything. That’s not good for me. I can’t do that.

John Goodwin (27:10): That’s good. And that that’s important. I said, even all the more so now as the mentality of do it the easy way is in some, in some areas in some walks of life has become the predominant way. And it’s I in… I recently interviewed Brandon Mole, who’s, he’s such a nice man, just such a nice man.

And love his, he wrote the Fablehaven series and he’s written some other ones, but he said, some of these books, it’ll take a couple of years for it to fully come together. So we can say, hear it how it is, how it’s going to like build and build and transition and this and then and it was and then he said, then, you know, you have to give something to get something. You know, so he says, you know, so when you see these AI books, it’s just like putting some prompts and get something, it’s like it’s not the same thing.

You know, there’s, and the difference in story from someone that really created a story with imagination and with you know thought and it’s the difference. I read some I haven’t read any AI books, but I’ll read AI articles and stuff and they’re even maybe they’re grammatically correct, there’s no emotion to them that I find. Whereas when I read like a good author, you really feel that book, that author.

I read a book a week almost for my podcast, unless I get lovely guests like yourself where I don’t have to read a book. I just have to read, you know, your history of stuff like, Wow, this is gonna be fun.

Kimberly Fakih (28:43): Well, I want you to read my book at some point, but that’s later, anyway.

John Goodwin (28:46): Okay, good. Well, if you send to me, I’ll definitely read it. I’ve got you know, I’ve I usually keep anywhere from four to six interviews recorded and then I have another like dozen or so. I get emails constantly saying, You wanna review my book? You wanna have me as a guest? And I try to keep it mostly against Writers of the Future things that can, that fits with the L. Ron Hubbard positioning of the contest is to provide that helping hand.

And, otherwise, I like to get the judges and the authors or people that enter the contest and they, and then they pro’ed out and they couldn’t, you know, enter anymore. But I’m just curious I didn’t put it in my email to you. Have you read any, ’cause I had so many I’ve sent a hundred, hundred and twenty five books to LJ and PW and not so many to Kirkus, but if you ended up ever reviewing any of the books that I sent there for reviewed any of those publications.

Kimberly Fakih (29:49): I was a children’s book reviewer for most of my life. So I think that excluded me from ever seeing those on my desk. And then in the case of Kirkus, we were just completely kept separate from the adult department. Nobody got to. I didn’t get to see their books until they came out as reviews and they didn’t look over my shoulder at all.

So I’ve seen, I feel like I’ve seen a lot of your books covered in the press. But am I you know, I think you’ve done a really great job, but I don’t have personal experience.

John Goodwin (30:24): Okay. Are you familiar with Writers of the Future?

Kimberly Fakih (30:27): Yes, I am. I was looking over the list of award winners and you know, and then the books that they’ve published after the award and just been really impressed by the range of people you have at the point in their career when this meant the most to them and really put them on the map. Of course, every name is slipping out of my brain now, but no, it’s a wonderful thing. It really…

John Goodwin (30:53): Like Nnedi Okorafor, you might be more familiar with her. She’s a more recent one. She was published in volume nineteen and she said it was a very important time of her life when she really needed that support when she got it there. Brandon Sanderson just he never won. He got an honorable mention, but he said I just kept getting reject after reject after reject. And then when I got that honorable mention, it was like okay, maybe there is hope for me, you know.

Kimberly Fakih (31:19): Wow. Yeah. No, listen, it is so… Well first I think you were going toward a question about AI and how it how it feels to read it. And I wanna put a pin in that and come back to that. But sure. The, as the award I don’t know what you need to stay on the road to writing. My first adult book was the result of me noticing I had a different job.

I was noticing the way different families interacted and how different it was from my family growing up. And I kept jotting down on post-its. I’m just talking about the loneliness of being a writer. I noticed all of these families and I thought, that is not my family. That is not my family. And I kept remembering little things that kind of nauseated me about how my family handled itself. And I just put post-it after post-it, well they’ll look back.

Happy families are all alike. Unhappy families don’t know they are sometimes. So we were Norman Rockwell on the outside and I don’t know what on the inside. But, so I’m just saying that one day I tucked everything under the cash register for about ten years.

And then one day the cash register fell off the counter because of the imbalance of all this notes I’d stuffed under there because I was keeping this part of my life away from customers with very curious eyes. So and I looked and I thought, my God, I’m obsessed with this stuff. What am I gonna do with this? And then cut to, closed that business. It was called Podunk Tea Room. It was in the East Village. It was a wonderful place. But I cut to me being on my own after that and deciding what to do and knowing I wanted I was a writer and I was going to go back to it.

But I looked at the post-its and said, okay, that’s it. I know what all of this is about and I really do have to put it out. It was really hard going for a couple of years there, thinking, who cares about my family? What a ridiculous thought. And then, one of the first publishers who saw it, you know, really, really loved it and felt connected to it. And now we’re going back to the AI conversation. The things that they said about the book that was written by a human by me in a moments of stress.

I don’t think anyone’s ever going to get comments like that about a piece of AI writing. I don’t care how good it gets at mirroring the human emotional state. I think there are stories that come out in the form of writing. And when you get encouragement from anywhere, anyone, you need that. The award is the boost that reminds us of how human-driven writing is.

The award is the thing that says your book has been in a front of a lot of eyes and they agreed you should keep going. And I can’t even imagine what kind of a boost that must be, you know, for the people who submit their work. And it’s just, you know, it’s just wonderful. It’s really remarkable.

John Goodwin (34:27): Yeah, it’s something that when L. Ron Hubbard created the contest in 1983, he’d already had quite a history. He’d spent quite some time writing in New York. he lived in New York. His main address the longest time was the Explorers Club. And ’cause he flew three flags for the Explorers Club on different missions that he did. And he was, but he’d go there and he said, Look you know you save up your money and you go to New York and then you live very high and you just really, you meet with all the editors and other authors and this stuff. And then when you’re out of money, leave. Don’t go into debt. Just leave and just stay there and just, you know. You know, he was very, very popular. He was one of the ones that made the top paid authors of the pulp era. And, but he wrote several articles that were published in Writer’s Digest and he was one of the youngest presidents of the American Book Guild, New York chapter, and he worked there with Dashiell Hammett and others at that time period that he was the president. But he was always trying to help writers, and he was the one that put in the thing where, because at that time you had to have been a published with however much in order to be a member of the of the guild. And he implemented a thing for the novice, you know, so that someone as aspiring that they could get in. So he put that in way back when in the forties, to help the new guy, you know, to get in there. So he’d always, he had a long history of that. And so when he launched the contest in ‘83 after publishing Battlefield Earth, a lot of the big judges there, you know, Frank Herbert, the guy that wrote Dune, and that that type of author were the ones that were the original judges. And they did it because one, they thought this is brilliant. I wish I could have done this or I wish I could afford this ’cause he made it so it was free. You know, so he did all things so it’s free to enter and that the winners are flown out to Hollywood for a bang up, you know, workshop and an event. And they’re encouraged, you know. So we then created this podcast. We created a free online workshop taught by Orson Scott Card, the guy that wrote Ender’s Game.

Kimberly Fakih (36:45): Sure, I’m sure.

John Goodwin (36:46): Kevin Anderson’s there. He’s the one that does all the Dune books now. And he’s done, he entered the contest, I think, 17 times before pro’ing out. Just, you know, a lot of folks. Nnedi Okorafor, like I mentioned to you, Tim Powers, three times World Fantasy Award winner. He was one of the first judges. But the whole thing is to carry forward that purpose as implemented by L. Ron Hubbard to just really provide that helping hand, you know.

And it’s just, it’s made such a difference. You know, the number of people that have won. We, this year, we broke a thousand people published in Writers of the Future, writers and artists published for the first time. Well, which is quite a milestone. You know, we’re very proud of that. And that’s why, you know, I so appreciate people like yourself who share that same purpose or that same drive as Mr. Hubbard had when he created the contest.

To help the writer, you know, and there’s again because of AI, it’s even all the more important to help the creatives because you’ve got movies that knock out imagination. You know, you don’t have to imagine, you just watch it, you know, and it’s so important you have people that can still imagine and can like translate that imagination onto paper or onto on the pictures and make something that you can really human that you can appreciate and connect with.

Kimberly Fakih (38:11): I just wonder I feel as if, I was mentored. I had so many people I’m who, I was, I went to a publishing course to before I came to New York and met a lot of old timers in publishing and they weren’t there because they were getting a fifty dollar honorarium. They were there because they wanted to pay it forward.

And I think the podcasts, especially with your emphasis on writers and helping writers understand the process and then maybe sometimes create their own processes. I think this is a really great way of paying it forward. I think I owe it to my daughters in publishing. That was an accident. I you know, I

John Goodwin (38:56): I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m sorry. I failed you.

Kimberly Fakih (39:04): Well people said when I was pregnant, they said, What are you gonna do if she doesn’t like to read? And I said, I hope she loves something as much as I love books. Whatever it is, I hope she has that. And then I went in a different direction for a few years. We had a tea room, as I said, it was a way of taking care of my husband. He needed tending and then and when he passed on we moved to the next thing. But she went to get her MFA in comics. She loved drawing, she loved graphic novels.

And then now she’s an editor of graphic novels. And when she was at Macmillan, she said, you know, there’s a lot of old people like you that I think you could be in publishing again if you want to. And I, So people say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but actually I’m the apple this time because she was at Macmillan and sort of encouraged me to, you know, go back into it. So

John Goodwin (39:48): Ha ha.

Kimberly Fakih (40:01): But I mean I really do feel this obligation to pay it forward to writers and so she brings her you know her it’s a very diverse group of friends and they, I just tell them come to my, I know where the bodies are buried, talk and I’ll tell you everything you need to know about your bosses that are now your that I knew back when I was an assistant. And it’s so it’s a little on the sly, but it works because

its giving them courage to be themselves in this industry, which hasn’t always, this publishing has always tried to shave off the rough edges and I just think we need more rough edges and I think self-publishing, indie presses, small presses, academic publishers, anybody who can use a review, I wanna give them that review and you know, we’re gonna come up with promo codes and discounts and things like that because I want everyone to be included.

I know who’s been excluded in the past and I just want to see them there and help them make their way doing their passion. You know, so let’s see. We hope, we hope.

John Goodwin (41:07): Which is great. Which is great. Yeah, no it is. So you’ve got a tagline on your website, this on discoverability. I just, so explain that a little bit.

Kimberly Fakih (41:25): As I said a little bit earlier, I think there’s just so many layers of discoverability. Librarians have to know a book exists for them to consider it, and then they have to know a book what a book’s about and have a review for it to be able to purchase it. So we’re helping librarians and booksellers as we go forward, getting subscribers to the website and the publication and eventually a print product is the hope.

And I’ve been spoken to a couple of times about when that print project will happen. So we’re getting people who purchase books and make book purchase decisions, books in front of them that they may not have found. We’re giving writers a chance to be discovered. We’re getting their books out in front of those people, but we’re also giving them professional feedback. Every reviewer I work with, I’ve worked back with for years.

These are all people from the past ten, fifteen years of my life who are in libraries who are in institutions who are educators or retired educators or publishing professionals, they they’ve seen it. I’m not saying they know what’s best. I’m not saying they’re gatekeepers. I’m saying they’ve just seen everything. And so if you do something, if you write a book about a talking pig who it ends up being a sheepdog, we want to tell you.

Yes, it was called, you know, E. B. White’s book. I can’t think of the name of it right now. It’s just leaving me. But we can tell you that book has been written, but it hasn’t been written from the angle of X, Y, and Z or whatever that writer has brought to it. So that’s discoverability is getting a professional assessment from really experienced people of where your book falls. And then I guess the rest of the discovery is you use the words.

As an author to make sure that your book reaches a wider audience than you would have had access to otherwise. And that’s the point. You find your readers. You give your, we, we’re trying to give you a front row seat to your actual readers and make that connection. You know, it’s a match. Let’s make a match. It’s the hope and the wish of all of that. So I think discoverability has become my sort of mantra, but I keep realizing it means way more than I thought when we first started talking about the tag.

John Goodwin (43:51): Yeah, I’ve been, I don’t know, last year or so, discoverability just all of a sudden just, it just hit me on the side of the head like that is the, once you’ve got a book and it’s edited and it’s, I mean you’ve got when I say book is defined just not words on a page. It’s been properly typeset, properly edited. You’ve got a decent cover on it, you know, not like here’s five prompts into generative AI to give you my, here’s my, isn’t this a cool cover? No.

You know, once you’ve got that, then it becomes an issue of like the discoverability. And it just, it really dawned on me how much I need to let people know like there are resources to be able to accomplish that. And so when Roy (Futterman) introduced me to you, I was very excited about this interview as a resource for people because, like you said, with PW, LJ, Booklist, Kirkus, all the regular review publications where you send books to, what you said twelve thousand?

Kimberly Fakih (44:57): It was twelve to fifteen, depending if you call it a Horn Book or not. And yeah.

John Goodwin (45:01): Okay, yeah. Yeah. Who was the editor of Horn Book?

Kimberly Fakih (45:04): Lisa Gershewitz? Or do you mean an Anita Sylvie?

John Goodwin (45:10): Before them, it was he retired.

He was the publisher of yes, we both we both went to Claremont College together, so that’s

Kimberly Fakih (45:15): Roger Sutton? Roger Sutton.

That greatest person. Yeah, yeah.

John Goodwin (45:21): Yeah. But the whole fact of getting reviews, it becomes like a catch twenty-two, which what you’ve done and when a few of these other ones we mentioned at the outset provide a solution to that because you know we, one thing we haven’t talked about is the impact of reviews like on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books a Million. How’s that fit in there and why is it significant for retail outlets.

Kimberly Fakih (45:53): I think those places are a really great resource. You mean like Amazon reviews and Goodreads? Or do you mean…

John Goodwin (45:59): Not just on reviews on being able to sell list and sell in Barnes and Noble and the fact what it does for you, yeah, on Amazon, yes or no on Goodreads, but most on retail outlets, whether they’re online or brick and mortar, the importance of reviews.

Kimberly Fakih (46:16): Well, I’m all in favor of the more the merrier. And when there’s you know, all of us read Amazon reviews for Toothpaste and Shampoo and book reviews are a version of that and yet you feel like it’s your neighbor talking about something. A long time ago I my father had said that I said, Are you going to go see that new movie, whatever it was? He was a John Ford Western guy.

And I said, Are you gonna go see that new Western? It’s gotten really horrible reviews. And he said, I don’t care about reviews. I talk to the bridge club about what I’m gonna go see. And so I think the Barnes & Noble and Books a Million and Amazon reviews, that gives you your neighbors thought. That gives you the community’s thought. That is just conversation that’s great because we’re talking about books.

Lord knows I don’t want people to stop talking about books no matter how they’re written. I just want us I mean, the written word. Now we say the written word in on a screen. That’s fine with me. However, you get your books, kids are reading on screens more than they’re reading on pages. I just want the books out there so we can have the conversation. So I’m just in favor of any of it.

I think in terms of getting the review that will get you into Barnes & Noble, right then you need the place like Book Life or Kirkus Indy or we hope Open Shelf Reviews because that’s just a very serious proposition for you. You are taking yourself seriously. You believe in the power of your book, but you want to make sure it’s discovered.

And so making sure it’s discovered, those places offer that and we offer the sisterhood of other library and education publications that lets you know it’s the same family, it’s the same standards, but we’re not paying for it with advertising or not yet. Roy will get to me for that. We’re paying for it through this other business model.

John Goodwin (48:20): Okay, good. And then you sent me some like some additional add-ons and what ’cause I what I always do is I send questions to my guests so we can coordinate back and forth. And you just mentioned is there a place for discussion of what a wide-open venue the business of self-publishing has become. And then we really are in the era of which everyone has a book idea, if not a book, and all the services available to writers can be muddy to wade through. So let’s put our waders on and address that.

Kimberly Fakih (48:51): I’m on the sixth floor, so there’s no chance of me getting muddy. Okay. but no, I think you know, I’ve read, I made my algorithm a long time ago, on Instagram and Threads just an endless source of people who want to design your book cover, who want to offer you know, I’ve heard there’s one guy. I can’t I’m not gonna say the name of it.

You might be interviewing him at some point and God bless him, I hope he does a great job and makes a ton of money. But he says, Don’t ever get your book published X way. Don’t ever get your book published X way. Instead, come to me and I will make sure that you get your book published Y way. And No, no, I wasn’t insulting you, I hope you know. I just mean fine, let him live and let live.

John Goodwin (49:34): I don’t do those kinds of interviews.

Kimberly Fakih (49:43): But there’s so much for writers who are mostly siloed people. Very few people use writing communities to get feedback. They might hire alpha readers or alpha editors, beta readers, beta editors off of Fiverr or other places like that, but they’re not going to reading groups. They’re not like involved in with other writer communities. So they’re vulnerable. To me, they’re really vulnerable. And that just makes me sad.

And that makes me want to say don’t spend money there until you’ve researched it, researched it really well. To that end, we’re going to be putting links. there’s Jane Friedman, there’s a few people that have really great writing resources that have been vetted by publishing professionals and everything. We’re going to have links on our website. That’s for anybody, that’s free. Our online presence is absolutely no subscription, which is also different from our sister publications.

But it’s really, I can’t imagine what it’s like to think to put your book into the hands of a graphic designer without knowing the vocabulary of graphic design and what works in a bookstore. You’re just taking their word for it. And so we have something called reader and market readiness ratings, which says, you know, is this a polished presentation? You know, five stars, four stars, three stars. Why are you saying that?

It almost makes the review write itself. Has this book been edited? Does this book have typos one through five? Is this book connecting with the demographic you’ve aimed it at? Or is this book do you need it for an older kid? You know, they’re doing that in fourth grade now. You know, it’s not McGuffey’s reader anymore in the schools. It’s kids are learning about Shakespeare in first grade, if they’re paying attention. So it’s just a way of rating things and then discussing them.

So that people can see how their book’s landing. To just go cold into an Instagram account and hand over money to someone that you’ve, has just only them saying they’re good at this. I don’t know what people are doing. I just find it fascinating.

John Goodwin (51:58): So exactly. And that’s why hopefully on one of those resources you put on your page, you also have Writers of the Future. We also have the, we have a forum. It’s won the best forum the last three or four years in a row, science fiction writing forum. And we have past winners and sometimes judges drop in there. It’s again everything on Writers of the Future dot com is free. There’s nothing you’ll be asked for money or anything at all. All the different aspects on there.

So it’s just one thing. In fact, we can’t sell our book. If you want to get Writers of the Future, you can’t buy it from Writers of the Future dot com because there’s no, we accept no money for any reason on that site. So you have to go to Galaxy Press dot com to purchase Writers of the Future. But we have on the, on our writing forum, we have a lot of past winners and we have one basic rule on there is you know, no negativity. So if someone comes on and they’re saying, wow, this why are you even bothering as a writer? This is just so tepid. This is so this is so that. They’re given one warning. It’s like do it again, you’ll be banned. They do it a second time, they’re banned, and they won’t they’ll never come back onto that site.

You know, if you want someone that’s going to give you negativity, fine, go to Facebook, go to X, go to whatever social site, and you can get plenty of it. But that’s not what this is about. It’s encouraging and just okay, good. Well.

Kimberly Fakih (53:18): Yeah.

John Goodwin (53:24): You might want to try this, or maybe you should take a look at this free online workshop you can take, which we’ve had over ten thousand people on, on how to write all the different parts of a story. You know, it applies not just science fiction or fantasy, it applies to any type of storytelling. And so we offer that, you know, for free. And but then the, when someone comes in there and says, Yeah, I this story, I’m this, hung up on this thing here. I’m not sure what to do. You know, there’s all this we have one overall forum, but there’s different forums under each one.

And you can just go in there and people say, Yeah, okay, well, you know, go ahead and send it to me. I’ll let me have a read, see if I can figure out something on that. And so there you get your they’re not alpha, they’re beta readers, you know, because you don’t know them, but they’re just willing their main thing they all share in common is they want to help you. And anytime someone on a forum wins the contest, everybody takes a win on that. Everybody celebrates that person’s win. Cause they know it’s a, it’s a serious achievement. Some people have been entering for decades before they finally win.

Kimberly Fakih (54:22): That’s a community. That’s really wonderful.

John Goodwin (54:24): Definite community. And like I said, it’s over a thousand now and still going strong. This was a, this year was year forty-two, so Life, the Universe and Everything was like the answer the answer to all things science fiction and fantasy was Writers of the Future. So

Kimberly Fakih (54:40): So great.

John Goodwin (54:42): Yeah. So if you can talk a little bit about now on Open Shelf, how do people find it? What’s the procedure to be able to enter it or to submit to it? What, how does it, just walk me through how that goes?

Kimberly Fakih (54:56): It’s really, it’s pretty simple. I mean we have on the website we have a page for librarians.

John Goodwin (55:04): And it’s called openshelfreviews.com.

Kimberly Fakih (55:06):Yes, openshelfreviews.com all one word. And we, it’s if there’s a landing page and it says, you know, do you want to know more, keep reading. Or do you want to submit your book? Click here. And the click takes them to a page of tiers for the pricing and what’s part of that. As well as an option to if you can’t wait six weeks for a review, there’s an option to get it in four weeks that has a, you know, a little a fee added onto it. So the picture books are one price, the standard novels are another price, and then there’s we already received a two hundred thousand word book and we had to

John Goodwin (55:48): Create a new price.

Kimberly Fakih (55:49): No, right. Not for that person, ’cause that was just on us for not thinking, my god, two you know, seven hundred and seventy pages long. It was great. So there’s four tiers to click on. You basically decide, you pay, and you get a link where you upload your book and then it comes to me an email notification and I turn, you know, through my, I think right now I have fifty reviewers. Those reviewers are all visible on something on the site called the editorial board. These, anyone can look up are humans, our human reviewers, there’s their photograph, there’s their bios, there’s where they work or have worked. So you know that this isn’t, you’re not submitting to an AI universe. I’m assigning to real people based on their specialties, their interests, their loves, their passions, the things they know about.

And then the review happens. It comes back to me after a few weeks and I edit it and then right now I’m accruing as many books as have gone through the process into s maybe a September first issue, we’re just not sure yet about how the workflow is.

John Goodwin (57:09): Will it be digital or print or both?

Kimberly Fakih (57:11): It’ll be digital at first. It’ll be published online as the September first issue or the September fifteenth issue. It’s searchable. We’re already showing up really well in search engines. And so people will be able to, the minute they will have a moment, two weeks, when they get the review back and they can look at it and think about the review and decide whether or not they want it published or not.

Some people we found out in surveys before this, they just want it for personal feedback while they’re still working on their book. And they’re treating it like an editorial assessment. And then they’re maybe they’ll submit a finished book to us some other day. Maybe that’s the most that we see. But they get a solid critique with all these ratings and all these you know ideas or just constructive feedback, as constructive as we can make it to use.

After two weeks, if we don’t hear a no from them, we publish. And then it’s there. And I’m hoping we get to do a print version of it. It’s been talked about a lot and so that would be a…

John Goodwin (58:22): Prints crazy hard these days with the cost of everything. It’s just, and as postage is just like skyrocketing. It’s just like, my gosh. But anyway, that’s a different interview right now. So a person can submit PDFs or JPEGs or TIF all…

Kimberly Fakih (58:42): a word doc a cover image if they…

John Goodwin (58:46): It doesn’t have to be a finished book then, so it can be a galley.

Kimberly Fakih (58:49): Yeah, absolutely. But once they’ve submitted that, they won’t be able to say, I did some updates, here’s the newer version. we just because of the tight deadline, we’re assigning them as we get them and the reviewers have committed to those timelines too. And so yeah, so it as I said, some people will take it as feedback and might submit again. we don’t know.

It’s just it’s a conversation and to that conversation what I’m hoping, I ran a section called Readers and Writers. I don’t know if you’re too young for this, but did you ever hear of iVillage.com back in the early aughts? The, it was a women’s community lifestyle website and NBC bought it and turned it into a sort of a magazine, a video magazine. But I had the Readers and Writers section was mine for a couple of years there.

And the thing is that the community threads are just like what you’re describing about Writers of the Future, that everybody was talking to everybody about everything all the time. Where they wrote, what paper they used, what word processor they were using, what who was upgrading to Windows graphics, you know, GUI (Graphical User Interface) technology, things like that.

It was so funny because they were talking to each other more than they were talking to us at the company. And those were the most unbelievably positive forums you could imagine. Just people helping each other. No skin in the game, no money, just their ideas in the game. And they really took good care of each other. So I’m hoping to be able to do something like that as we grow our community where they can talk to each other as self-published or small presses. They can talk to each other and talk to me, because I answer all my emails.

John Goodwin (01:00:44): That’s great. So they can find that also when they go to openshelfreviews.com. Your “contact me” is on there.

Kimberly Fakih (01:00:51): Yes, and or they can say just K Fakih at openshelfreviews.com right now and any anybody’s free to write me. I would love to hear from anyone about all of this. It’s a big adventure.

John Goodwin (01:01:04): Okay. Well thank you very much, Kim. And that went really fast as I knew it would, but…

Kimberly Fakih (01:01:10): Thank you. I hope you don’t have to edit out everything.

John Goodwin (01:01:13): No, we’re good on that stuff.

So thank you for listening. Subscribe to the Writers of the Future Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. We’ve also been syndicated on the United Public Radio Network where can find these podcasts as well.

Writers and Illustrators of the Future are a contest created by L. Ron Hubbard to provide a means for the aspiring writer and artist to be seen and acknowledged for over four decades. It is free to enter and open to amateur short story writers and artists of science fiction or fantasy. Again, thank you very much, Kim.

Kimberly Fakih (01:01:41): Thank you.