Posted on November 2, 2013 at 12:00 AM by Jeffrey Bruner

Your support of The Fussy Librarian has been humbling.

When planning the website, I always had big goals. But never in my wildest dreams did I think that, in less than a month, my author mailing list would have 1,000 names and the website would have 1,300 books waiting to run. Amazing.

Even though we’re still small, your response has been a vote of confidence that The Fussy Librarian will succeed and you want to be part of it from the beginning. That’s enormously gratifying.

At the same time, I need to make some changes in order to provide you with the level of service that you deserve. Books aren’t being approved quickly enough and the waiting lists are getting very long in some genres.

I also am not finding the time that’s needed to devote to marketing so we can continue to grow. Your Facebook and blog posts and messages are Twitter are very helpful, but they need to be supplemented with daily efforts dedicated to marketing the website to book bloggers and small publishing houses, who have their own resources that can help us grow.

While my wonderful wife, Stephanie, can start helping me in December after she graduates from nursing school, the “staff” right now is me. Well, there’s The Fussy Librarian herself, but she doesn’t handle book approvals or scheduling or social media or website management … just the book matching wizardy.

So I need to temporarily pause submissions in our most popular genres in order to process and schedule the books that have already been submitted. I promise to reopen submissions as soon as possible:

Science fiction (will reopen Nov. 30)
Fantasy (will reopen Dec. 7)
Paranormal romance (Dec. 7)
Women's fiction (Dec. 7)
Mysteries (Dec. 28)
Young adult (Dec. 28)
Romance-contemporary (Feb. 22)

These dates will be listed and updated from time to time on the “For Authors” page of the website. Announcements will also be included in the weekly authors newsletter and posted on Facebook and Twitter.

The submission changes take effect today. I have invested in genre management software, which will be installed over the next few days. When it’s completed, any genre not currently accepting submissions will be grayed out and you’ll see a note directing you to the authors page on the website.

One great feature of the genre management system is that it will allow me to create new categories instead of contracting with the programmers. (Coming soon: Romantic suspense.) I’ll be contacting some of you over the next two weeks for your input so that we can expand offerings in romance, mystery and thrillers. Once I’ve settled on the new categories, I’ll announce them in the newsletter and you can let me know if you want to change the category of any already-submitted books. This will have the net effect of decreasing the waiting list in some genres, allowing me to re-open them for submissions sooner.

Categories: Library Updates

Comments
<p>Jeffrey, I appreciate all you are doing to help us authors and your readers in finding the books they love. Hang in there, growth is a good sign. &quot;Only good lies before you.&quot; Lisa Riebe author of Pond Punkies&nbsp;</p>
Lisa Riebe | 5/24/18 at 2:32 AM
<p>Hope you soon emerge from under the piles of books to find your site even more successful than you dreamed! C.B. Pratt author of Eno the Thracian adventure series</p>
C.B. Pratt | 5/24/18 at 2:32 AM
Add Comment

* Indicates a required field