I ride the train to work and often I see a lot of young afro-american women clutching tight to an urban romance. Now while the premise ussually involves relations (adultry, dl brothers, wantoness behavior, or dangerous attraction) some also include religious bits such as locale, occupation and/or underlying themes.
As a lover of paranormal lit, I often wonder why there's not more interest by the afro-american community in things that go bump in the night. I myself was surprised to discover Dark Thirst, an afro-american paranormal anthology and L.A. Banks collection of paranormal lit.
Still there is a niche which needs to be filled. Maybe it has something to do with religious beliefs, maybe a lot of young, metro-ridding women are just not interested. But in my pipe dreams of promoting "A Guardian's Desire," I thought about advertising on some of the urban sites. (The fact that I suck at promo not withstanding)
I went online and did a little research. My cover looks just as slick and as saucy as many of the urban titles, so I figured 'perfecto' then I thought some more (as folk with OCD ussually and unfortanately do). While the issue of submission complexity occured to me, the fear that my book might not be urban or black enough (I know it ain't PC) did occur to me. Not just that however, I also write gay fiction and how would readers and/or reviewers respond to that? Would they discount me because I only have one heteroish novel? Yes, I have several black characters, but is there some taboo out there? I don't really know. I am however, going to attempt one of the review sites below (or at least try to advertise) but my paranoias aside, for those of you who are interested--Look what I found :D
1 comment:
Thanks for the interest...we have a dedicated reviewer who reads a bunch of Sci-Fi / Fantasy/ Paranormal / Speculative / Suspense of the urban vernacular. Please see our submission guidelines at: http://www.urban-reviews.com/submissions.html for more info. If, for some reason, you don't want to risk going through the review process, there's always advertising. Our guidelines for that are located here: http://www.urban-reviews.com/advertising.html
Oh, and the reason we saw your blog post is because we have a Google Alert set for the phrase 'urban reviews' so we got an email right away for it! Look forward to hearing from you soon!
- Radiah of Urban Reviews
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