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Plug Your Book!
39
Amateur book reviews
Keith Donohue had an idea for a book, a story rattling around in his
brain for years. But he could never find the time to write it. With a full-
time job and a family with three young children, putting it off was easy.
Then Donohue turned 40, and a short time later came the events of
Sept. 11, 2001. He decided, “It’s now or never,” and the red-haired
Irishman began writing. He wrote on scraps of paper on the subway to
work in Washington, D.C., and scribbled during his lunch hour sitting
on park benches.
Finally, after several months of rewriting and polishing, the story
was finished: The Stolen Child, a fantasy inspired by the W.B. Yeats
poem and what Donohue knew of the changeling legend.
And that’s when things got really hard. It took Donohue two years
to find an agent to shop the manuscript to publishers, nearly causing
him to give up. He received 10 rejections, and was considering self-
publishing. Then Donohue got a call from an agent who’d had the
manuscript for a year but misplaced it. Soon, publisher Nan Talese, who
runs an imprint at Doubleday, took on the book, and it seemed success
was at hand.
At last, Donohue’s book was in print. But then another hurdle,
seemingly worst of all: The critics weren’t impressed with Stolen Child.
In fact, they completely ignored it; not a single major newspaper
reviewed it. Ask any big publisher, and they’ll tell you: Any novel stiffed
by the critics has no chance of becoming a bestseller.
But the story wasn’t over. A review copy of the book ended up in the
hands of Linda Porco, Amazon.com’s merchandising director. She
passed it among her office mates, and it was unanimous—everyone loved
it. So Porco tried something new. She got more copies of the book and
mailed them to Amazon’s most active customer reviewers. They review
books on the site as a hobby, assigning five stars to the books they love,
one star to the books they hate, and an essay explaining why.
Within weeks, all but one of those Amazon Top Reviewers posted a
rave review. Promptly, Stolen Child became Amazon’s bestselling fiction
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