Yesterday I heard from my editor that The Path of Names got a starred review from the magazine Booklist. Hurray! Then, this morning I woke up to find that The Path of Names got a very nice, very intelligent review in The Quill and Quire, which is sort of the Canadian publishing industry’s version of Booklist or Publisher’s Weekly. Neither of these reviews are posted on the Internet yet, so you’ll have to take my word for them at this point. I’ll post links when they are made public / free. That said, somehow a snippet of The Quill and Quire review has already made it onto The Path of Names’ Amazon.com page. Read it here. (Scroll down to the editorial reviews section.)
So what’s the big deal? As I understand it (based on my exhaustive research (by which I mean a four minute Google search carried out via cell phone)), there are a handful of periodicals that cater to various segments of the publishing industry. Booklist, for instance, particularly caters to librarians, the idea being that they’ll read the starred review and be more likely to order a copy of The Path of Names for their library. The idea is that though these periodicals don’t have the biggest circulations, their readers are influential – book buyers for bookstores, librarians, reviewers for newspapers and bigger magazines, etc. (Most of this information is cribbed from this ten-year-old Slate piece, but what are the chances anything has changed in the publishing industry in the last ten years?)
Okay. So that’s why this is a big deal. The other reason it’s nice is, well… Come on. It’s nice when anybody likes a story of mine.
The reviews are also an exciting sign that the publication date is almost upon us. After I read the review in Q & Q, it occurred to me that at this point, nineteen days before The Path of Names’ release, my novel has already been read by a few dozen people. By my calculations, this is almost exactly a few dozen more people than will ever read any of my academic publications.
Speaking of the imminent launch of The Path of Names, I will post soon about my book launch events (in Vancouver and New York City), plus some additional events I’m doing in Philadelphia and maybe even Bethesda (I’m going to Bethesda for a teaching conference but may fit in some book events before or after.) This next post will include the beautiful flier that the good people at Scholastic Canada produced for my Vancouver event.
Nineteen days left until publication…
Ari B. Goelman 