Christina Katz

These non-fiction how-to books have become difficult for me to read, rate, and review. It shouldn’t be Get Known Before the Book Deal’s fault as it is merely “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Many predecessors received more fair treatment than I want to give this book, so that being said I’m going easy on this one and speaking more on “How to” books in general.

The biggest issue with nearly all these sort of dastardly books is that they harp on one thing over and over and over and over and over again. They have a morsel of truth. They have that tidbit of worthwhile information. The author could make all their points on one page of text, possibly take five to ten more pages to expand what they said in this one page, and that’s it. There’s no need to repeat it forty-six times. No need to give examples of the same thing over and over. No need to repeat it forty-six times. You get the point.

Clearly some revelation dawns on the author and they feel they must share this knowledge. That’s great. But if it’s not enough knowledge to fill a book, please don’t waste my time; I can simply read the book description on the back cover and get the information I need.

Get Known Before the Book Deal is guilty of this. It also pretends to be all-encompassing but really is a book about Non-Fiction publication with the occasional hint for fiction writers. There are some good ideas in here, and it did get me thinking about my platform, but I would’ve rather spent my actually developing my platform. And had I just been given the gist of this book without reading it, I would’ve had time to do so.… (mais)