Our Lawyers Are Making Us Do This: A Message from CrookTub

Dear…author?

Thank you for the side-splitting laugh we had when our intern Jennifer told us that yet another indie author attempted to submit an order with CrookTub. Unfortunately, the editorial team, that is, Jennifer and Chippy, her robot chipmunk, has not selected your “book” and probably never will.

See, as a book promotion site, we get so darned many of these things. And because of, um, well, we can’t tell you that, at least without a lawyer present, we can only feature 0.1% of indie “books,” but only if they’re by Hugh Howey. We have to satisfy our subscribers’ desires for things that Oprah likes, or else how would we make any money, right?

Our decision is not a comment on the quality of your “book,” just the fact that you wrote it in the first place. Now, if you were Clive Cussler, Jonathan Franzen, or someone else who doesn’t need to be shopping their wares on the interwebs like… a common peddler of wares on the interwebs, we might think about it for a couple minutes. At least before collapsing into a giggling fit of hysterics and needing to be medicated. But our goal is to feature BOOKS written by people readers have heard of before, so that each listing is a worthwhile investment for the giant conglomerate of publishers we represent our partners.

If you’re still reading this, check out some tips on how you can maybe, just maybe, rouse Jennifer and Chippy from their usual state of catatonia. But please, wait a couple of weeks until you try again. It takes us that long for our sides to stop hurting. Whatever you decide to do, thank you for your interest in CrookTub, don’t forget to tell your published friends about us, and we wish you the best of luck with your…um, “book.”

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Tips for submitting to our will

Your submission will be reviewed by Jennifer and Chippy if, by some millennial stroke of lightning, it meets these minimum requirements:

• Price point: We rarely feature books without a flightless waterfowl or its multi-hyphenated equivalent pressed in gold leaf upon its spine, but even so, everyone wants free books, so if it ain’t free, take a hike. Doesn’t make money for you anymore? We don’t care. We’re making some, so it’s all good. That trickle-down thing still works, right?
• Date flexibility: Frankly we don’t give a flightless waterfowl’s tail feathers if you’ve already scheduled and paid for six different promos at other, less, uh, discriminating websites. We’ll slot you in whenever we want and whenever we darned well get around to it. And you’ll like it. Frankly, you should count yourself lucky if we even pretend that Chippy read your email. Considering his busy schedule.
• Professional presentation: It doesn’t matter what your cover looks like as long as it has a marketable author’s name in 96-point foil relief and is printed with the logo of a publisher that dates back to Melville. And we don’t mean Schlomo Melville, either.
• Customer reviews: As long as that customer is a nationally distributed print publication, cool. If it’s from your aunt Josephine, try peddling your papers on Twitter. Don’t believe what that Crosbie guy says about our having a “minimum requirement” of reviews or anything else. It’s a myth. So is the other stuff we won’t admit to requiring.
• Critical reviews: Okay, we begrudgingly understand that not everyone’s book will be reviewed in the New York Times. But on your product page, we want to see editorial sources we trust, like that guy you just paid five hundred bucks to tell you that your book’s only problem is that it’s TOO good and other writers will get jealous. Awards attract our attention as well. As long as they’re really shiny and you have to fly to Sweden to receive them.
• Subject matter: It’s not our fault that Amish zombie romances are so hot this week that we don’t have room for you on our schedule. Try writing about talking kittens or magic knitting needles instead. But you’d better hurry…half the agents in New York are already saying those are dead. So is the novel. And reading. You might as well change careers and go into something that really pays…like running one of these book promotion sites.

Author: Laurie Boris

Laurie Boris is a freelance writer, editor, proofreader, and former graphic designer. She has been writing fiction for over twenty-five years and is the award-winning author of four novels. She lives in New York’s lovely Hudson Valley. Learn more about Laurie at her website and her Amazon author page. View all posts by Laurie Boris