Send me your books

There are, however, a few guidelines that I’d ask you to follow.

We have a paid subscriber Zoom call tomorrow at 8 PM Eastern. I’ll send the invitation to paid subscribers about an hour before the call. We’ll discuss Chapters 1 & 2 of You and Your Profile (along with whatever people might want to talk about). Bring a question, a beverage, or just yourself.

Source

My DMs are full. When I wake up in the morning, I often have five or six requests across platforms from various people. Most are spam, and they’re easy to ignore. There’s one request, though, that I don’t want to ignore: people asking if they can send me their books.

I haven’t always responded to these. This is a failing on my part. I tend to see a message, tell myself that I’ll get to it later, and then forget about it. This means that you might have reached out to me and asked if you could send me a book, and it’ll look like I ignored you. (I suppose I did ignore you, but I didn’t mean to.)

I like that my audience writes books; it shows that I’m reaching the right people. I also know that it takes a lot of courage to send your writing to someone — just a few weeks ago, I sent a rough manuscript to a friend, and I was nervous for days. I don’t want these books to go ignored.

Here’s what I’m going to do about it.

From now on, if someone wants to send me their book – whether that’s a new title from a press, a self-published work, or a manuscript that you really want me to see – you can send it to me in one of two ways.

First, you can email me. My business email is jared@commonplacemedia.com. Send it as a PDF, ideally, or in an epub format; please do not make me slog through a Word document. Ideally, you’ll use a subject line like A subscriber with a book or something equally informative.

Second, you can send me a physical copy. Send it to my PO box:

Jared Henderson
PO Box 118
Cedar Park, TX 78630

I check that box every few weeks.

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There are, however, a few guidelines that I’d ask you to follow.

1. Don’t send a first draft. The manuscript doesn’t have to be perfect, but send me something that is reasonably polished! The reason for this: I’m not in a position to give detailed comments to anyone, and if you’re at that stage of writing, another set of eyes will better serve you.

2. Don’t send me writing that was generated by AI. If you use AI for research, or for basic things like copyediting, I’m not going to ask you to disclose that (and compared to AI writing, I have a significantly less visceral reaction). But don’t send me any AI writing. The reason for this: I want to read your writing, not a machine-generated book.

3. Don’t offer payment. I get this sometimes, and I always have to decline. I’m not offering professional feedback, nor am I providing another kind of service, so I’m not going to ask for compensation of any kind.

In exchange, I’ll offer this:

1. I will read, at a minimum, the first five pages of what is sent to me. If I like it, I might read the whole thing. If you send me your writing, I am promising to read at least a little bit of it.

2. If I manage to read the whole thing and enjoy it, I will write you back about it. I’m not promising thorough comments, but I do like to talk to people about their books.

Thank you, everyone, and good luck with your reading and writing.