Submissions

Interested in getting your book reviewed on Catholic Reads? For a $30, we accept unsolicited submissions for review. The book must either be written by a Catholic author or explore themes in common with Catholicism.

The money from the fee goes toward maintaining the business. All person involved are volunteering their time & effort for the good of other authors.

We Find Readers for Your Book:

 We are a book-discovery service to help Catholic readers find new books and authors to love and champion.

Requirements for Receiving a Review:

 You or your publisher agrees to one of the following:

1. 1.  To run a prize drawing with your book featured.
      1. You must provide a minimum of 3 prizes.
      2. One of the prizes must be MORE than just a signed copy of your book. You can include bookmarks, well printed fan art, T-shirts, pins, sneak peaks, exclusive writer advice with you the author etc. Get creative. You can search for what other authors include in their giveaways for inspiration.
      3. You can also team up with other authors to provide a prize bundle of multiple books or include multiple books from your backlog as a prize bundle.
      4. We can assist in teaming you up with other authors for a giveaway prize bundle or you can reach out to your own network.
   2.  To put your book up for a flash sale with these parameters:
      1. The book is priced at 50% off or less.
      2. The sale will be on the ebook, paper/hardback, audiobook or some combination of these formats.
      3. The sale period will be for a minimum of 24 hours and a maximum of 2 weeks.
      4.  It can be on any online store, on your publisher’s website, or on your own site.
      5. You have the option of making the sale open to the public or using a coupon code to limit it to CatholicReads subscribers and anyone else you share the code with, (such as your own newsletter).

Regarding flash sales, these can be tailored to different marketing needs for your book. Since we modeled ourselves off of Bookbub we recomend authors and publishers to read this article when deciding what sort of promotion they want to run with us. If your publisher is concerned about losing money, one option is to put only the ebook on sale, which takes nothing from production costs, and/ or using a Promo Code which limits the sale to only those people you share the code with, such as our subscriber list.

We then send a link to that sale to our 800+ subscribers, with whom Catholic Reads has built a rapport for recommending quality Catholic books, and who are actively interested in Catholic literature.

Our email list has an open rate double that of BookBub (a larger company we used as a model).

Once we have read and accepted your book for review, we will bill you for our fee of $30. You will not be charged unless your book is accepted for inclusion on our website. This fee does not earn us a profit but just covers overhead costs so we can keep functioning professionally.  

In fact if we can cover our costs through ad space or patreon support we will return to offering our services for free, as we did for the first four years of opperation.

Priests, and other professed religious under a vow of poverty are exempt from paying the fee.

Other Requirements:

• Error free. We look for content that is well-formatted and free of typos and grammatical errors.
• Catholic & Catholic Friendly. Your book does not need to be written by an author who is Catholic. We respect the privacy and ingenuity of authors. If you are an author and wish to make it known that you are a Catholic, we will inform our readers. If you wish the book to be its own voice we will respect that as well. We will point out to our readers where a book’s worldview seems to explore, agree with, or differ from a Catholic one and leave it up to the reader to decide if such a book is for them. This point also serves as insurance in case we misinterpret the message of the book. Your book need not explore Catholicism solely. However, we will be asking ourselves if a Catholic audience would benefit from the story in question. Characters from other faiths and symbolism incorporating diverse perspectives are appreciated. In fact, some of us have specific religions and cultures, aside from Catholic ones, that we are personally interested in seeing more of. (See more on that on our About page.) Disagreement and Dialogue through literature are cherished. Misrepresentation is not. The quickest way to ensure your book will not be reviewed is if you represent Catholicism as believing, saying or doing things that the Church does not believe, say or do. If however you have different Catholic characters with different attitudes towards things within the faith that is fine. Basically our goal is to vet out misinformation that breeds prejudice and misunderstanding.
• Not A Catholic? Your book may qualify for our Bridge Books selection. See our post What is a Bridge Book for clarification.
• Multiple Submissions. You may submit more than one book at a time. If you wish us to review a series start by requesting we review the first book and note in the body of the message if the book is part of a series.
• No re-submissions. If we do not agree to review your book on the first try we are not likely to agree the second time. However, you may submit a different book by the same author.

Tips

• Find your Ideal Reviewer. Go to our “About” page and read about our reviewers to find out what we are looking for in the next book. If you can find a reviewer who might like your book this will increase the chances that you will get a review.
• Our Credibility rests on Honesty. Our goal is to provide our readers with quality stories. Thus we will not post a review of your book if we cannot post a good review. That said, a good review does not mean that it will be without criticism. Our readers know that just having a review on the site counts as a recommendation. Thus the content of reviews is mostly focused on helping readers discern if the book is the right book for their individual tastes and spiritual needs. Also if we have not yet reviewed your book it does not necessarily mean that we do not like it. We may just be busy. Keep in mind that we are a small team, providing this service for free. It is not a personal criticism if we happen not to like your book. Our credibility with our readers rests upon our sincerity. If we cannot provide a sincere and positive review of your book then you will find better success elsewhere anyways.

How to Submit

Fill out this submission form here

If your book passes the vetting process we will then contact you to schedule the sale or giveaway drawing and subsequent promotions. Promotion details will be decided AFTER the vetting process. 

If you wish to know what number your book submission is in the queue you can email us at readcatholic@gmail.com at anytime and we will let you know.