Article Request Form – Your Epic Tales, Our Easy Trails

As reading is a significant time investment, with some books exceeding over twenty hours of reading time, providing an interested potential buyer with a short, in-depth look into your book is paramount. This fact makes a book review one of the most important marketing tools in your arsenal as an author.

A book review solves two problems for a prospective reader:

• It allows them to determine if the story is something they would be interested in
• And it helps them decide on whether the book would be worth their time

So why wouldn’t you want a free review from us? A word of advice – don’t just stop with The Trail of Tales – reach out to as many reviewers as possible to generate some buzz for your book from all of their audiences. The more places it becomes visible, the more chances you have of getting another sale of your book!

We read the entire book from start to finish before beginning our review. This is to ensure that we have the complete picture of what your book represents before publishing our review.

The exception to this is if we just don’t enjoy the book, and the timeframe exceeds two months. In this situation, we disclose at the very beginning that we did not finish reading the book, and give a % of the book read/page number for physical copies.

Here are some things to consider if you want a review from us:

All permissions granted to us for the use of copyrighted materials in our articles are considered indefinite ONLY for the agreed-upon articles. Under no circumstances will these copyrighted materials be used on our site in any other way.

By the nature of how our website works, they will also appear on a unique media page in our sitemap.

• Our reviews are 100% authentic representations of our opinions.
  • You cannot pay for a good review. If you try, we will immediately sever all working relationships with you.
• We will not show you the review prior to publishing
• We will not change the review rating unless there is an error on our part.
• We will not take down a published review for any reason

By requesting us to review your book, you agree to be bound by these terms.

Maturity focuses on the Trail of Tales extends from young adults to new adults, so 16-30-year-olds. We do not review books that have a focus on explicit material – but we do review books that have some explicit scenes. If your book has such scenes, notifying us ahead of time during the review interview process is helpful so that we can properly inform our readers with a warning that such scenes exist in the reviewed material.

TLDR:

• We do not review books with a focus on mature and explicit subject matter, AKA Sexual Content
  • Exception – There can be sex scenes in your book, but they need to be short, and not occur frequently.
  • If your book contains sexual content, please inform us before we begin the review process.

If you want a review written by us, we’ll need a few things to provide a high-quality review.

• A copy of your book for review purposes only
  • This can be in e-book form or a physical copy. E-book is preferred (I’m limited on physical storage space for books)
• The total wordcount of the book being reviewed
  • We use this to calculate the estimated reading time based on a reading speed of 200 words per minute
• Permission to use your book cover in the review only
• Permission to use a collection of quotes from the book for point emphasis in a review (1-10 quotes max)
• Some sort of affiliate program opportunity, such as the Amazon Associates Program

We may modify your book cover should the dimensions not fit our website template by using an AI Image Expansion tool. This fills in the edges of your book to fit a common image size. We do this to keep a consistent look across each Author Catalog Post.

We understand this use case is controversial, so you can opt out of this if you prefer us to use only the original, but resized version optimized for web presentation.

Additionally, for review posts, we create custom character portraits in a specific style with the help of AI image-generation tools. We take things a step further by removing the backgrounds of the generated portraits and creating a background environment inspired by a scene within the book.

If you have official artwork of your characters, you can provide those instead, and we’ll serve that instead. Appropriate credit will be given in the caption below the image.

When readers stumble upon a new author (to them), they sometimes want to dive into their other works if they enjoyed the book they discovered. As a result, they will often search for author name books, which is what our Author Catalog Post aims to provide the answer for.

The benefit of our Author Catalog post is that we link back to your store page for every book you’ve published, and buy another book by you. Additionally, once we’ve completed the review, we will also include a link from the Author Catalog Post to the associated review.

This increases the likelihood that your books will be purchased, as people searching the term book name review have buying intent, but just need one last push to convince them to buy.

Here are some things to consider if you want us to create an author catalog post for you.

All permissions granted to us for the use of copyrighted materials in our articles are considered indefinite ONLY for the agreed-upon articles. Under no circumstances will these copyrighted materials be used on our site in any other way.

By the nature of how our website works, they will also appear on a unique media page in our sitemap.

• Our author catalog posts require permission to use an image of every book you’ve ever published and will publish in the future on our site.
  • These permissions extend to the review articles we publish for each of the books that appear in your Author Catalog Post, should you agree to us doing reviews for every one of your books

By requesting us to create an author catalog post for you, you agree to be bound by these terms.

The dev time of an Author Catalog Post is directly proportional to the number of books an author has published. An author with three books published might only need a few hours to publish a complete article. However, some authors have hundreds of books published, and quite predictably, they take a lot longer to gather all of the required information and assets.

Providing the required information to us ahead of time can dramatically speed up the publishing process, as we don’t need to sift through various websites to collect all the information we need.

Maturity focuses on the Trail of Tales extends from young adults to new adults, so 16-30-year-olds. Any books that you have published that have sexual content, or extremely explicit material will need to be disclosed to our readers. Book covers featuring nudity or explicit material will be censored, or excluded from our site should you not wish us to alter the cover in any way.

If you want us to create an Author Catalog Post for you, we’ll need a few things to expedite the publishing process.

• A list of every book you have published
  • Include their links to the store you want us to promote
• Each book’s publishing date
• If a book is a part of a series, include the series next to each book title, and mark what number it is in that series
• The total word count for each book to calculate the estimated reading time
• The most up-to-date book covers for each book you’ve published
• (Optional) A series summary for each book series, or an individual book summary for standalone books
  • 1-4 paragraphs long

Please notify us ASAP when you publish a new book so that we can keep your Author Catalog Post up-to-date.

This article type may utilize AI to summarize book series that we have not yet read (which is always disclosed when used), giving a brief glimpse into what a reader can expect from a series. The AI summary is not always accurate, so input from you, the author is invaluable in order to accurately describe what to expect from your books.

This is only done in the event that you do not provide a series summary.

Once we’ve read a series by you, we will replace the AI summary with our own.

We may modify your book cover should the dimensions not fit our website template by using an AI Image Expansion tool. This fills in the edges of your book to fit a common image size. We do this to keep a consistent look across each Author Catalog Post.

We understand this use case is controversial, so you can opt out of this if you prefer us to use only the original, but resized version optimized for web presentation.

As we use summaries in our reviews and our Author Catalog Posts, a book video summary will enhance both of them to be more interactive. This increases the likelihood of someone making a purchase, and as an added benefit, increases the reach that your book gets from our efforts by presenting to a video audience.

Here are some things to consider if you want us to create a Book Summary Video:

All permissions granted to us for the use of copyrighted materials in our articles and video thumbnails are considered indefinite ONLY for the agreed-upon videos & articles. Under no circumstances will these copyrighted materials be used on our site in any other way.

By the nature of how our website works, they will also appear on a unique media page in our sitemap.

We upload the summary video to our YouTube channel as well.

By requesting us to create a book summary video for you, you agree to be bound by these terms.

Creating a video is a very large time investment on our part.

Step 1 is reading the book that we create a video summary for. This is easily the biggest contributing factor to the timeframe, but it is a necessary step in order for us to capture the personality of the characters we voice.

Step 2 is drafting an original script from scratch, one that captures the personality of the character that we voice. This is another large time investment to do correctly, as the script will make or break a video.

Step 3 is recording the actual script audio using our professional audio equipment:

• The Maono PD400X studio microphone,
• The Samson Q2U
• The Behringer UMC204HD audio interface
• All into our Digital Audio Workstation, Reaper

Step 4 is editing the recorded audio, taking out the bad takes (leaving some for a blooper reel at the end for some added comic relief). We make a lot of mistakes in the recording process (a natural aspect of voice acting and filmmaking in general) so editing consumes a significant time chunk.

Step 5 is sourcing B-Roll or creating it from scratch. If the former, step 5 can be pretty quick, but if the latter, the time investment soars to new heights. Creating B-roll is absurdly time-consuming if you don’t have a vision in your head and you are just trying to muck about until you think of something useful or valuable.

Step 6 is the timeline editing of the video itself, where all of the assets, both video and audio, are Imported into Davinci Resolve and laid out into a draft of the final video. This is where you splice the script into sections and create a video segment that depicts the feeling of what the script is supposed to portray. This is a long process.

Step 7 is selecting ambient, commercial-safe music tracks to accompany the voiceover, designed to further convey the emotions that we try to evoke in our viewers using the personality of the portrayed character from your book.

Step 8 is the mastering phase, where we properly balance the audio tracks so that the voiceover is always heard well over the music, but the music isn’t so quiet that its useless to the video. Admittedly, this step doesn’t take much time once the previous steps are completed.

Step 9 is the VFX phase, where we add text and other elements to the video that enhance the b-roll further.

Step 10 is drafting the YouTube Video thumbnail to be uploaded. This can be a significant time investment if we are trying to capture a certain style that we both can agree on.

Step 11 is choosing a list of 5-10 video titles to A/B test for CTR.

Step 12 is creating an effective video description for YouTube, adding to the SEO value of the video, allowing it to be better discovered in search.

Step 13 is marketing the video across our various platforms.

Add in the final aspect, this is not my day job. I have life obligations that consume a fair amount of my limited time. As such, producing a single video takes a lot of time.

So, the idea of the book summary video is to briefly pull the viewer into the world that you as an author have created. It does this by acting out a scene set somewhere in your book, from the perspective of a male character that is featured prominently within the book.

Why Male?

Devon is male, and if you heard his attempt to voice Spensa from Brandon Sanderson’s Skyward series, you’d understand why he can’t do female voices. In the future, we may do videos with a female perspective, but for the moment, that is out of reach. He simply can’t emulate a female voice.

What about Voice Changers?

We do not use them. We want each gender to be represented as authentically as possible, and a male voice actor using a modulated voice changer tends to miss that mark. We hope you understand.

Honestly, just a copy of your book (if it isn’t on Kindle Unlimited) and your blessing to use the book cover. Summary videos are pretty cool like that.