Every reader who loves your book knows someone else who would.

Lena Harlow spent eleven years on her first novel, The Weight of the East Field, most of it at a kitchen table between four and six in the morning. When it came out it sold to people who knew her, and a few who didn’t, and then it went quiet. On Amazon it had six ratings.

Lena is a character; her story began on the Silent Clamor Press Substack. On a delayed flight she had watched a nurse named Tasha finish the book at the gate, talk about it for eleven minutes, and promise a review on the way to her boarding group. It arrived three months later. Tasha meant it. Ordinary life got in the way. So when the library in Lena’s town asked her to read in November, she went prepared.

The man in the Broncos jacket

Nine people came. Afterward a man waited by the door with a library copy, the spine cracked white in two places. He wasn’t really a reader, he said. His wife, Denise, had waited five weeks for that copy and made him read it. He read it in two nights.

Lena had added the book to PostShop Relay by scanning the barcode on the back cover. She tapped Show the QR code on her dashboard and turned her phone toward him. He scanned it with his own phone and her book’s reader page opened. He tapped Amazon and wrote a review by the door. Then he scrolled down. The library button brought up the request page of the library he was standing in, with the title, author and ISBN ready to paste, and he asked it to add a second copy. The bookstore button listed the shop on Fourth Street that Denise liked, with an email already written asking them to carry the book. He sent it from the parking lot.

Last on the page was a line that said Know someone who’d love it? He tapped Text it to a friend and sent it to Denise.

Lena met one reader that night. The page did not stop with him.

Where it went next

Denise had read the book first and never reviewed it. She did that night, on Goodreads, then sent the page to her sister Carol in Tucson, who had borrowed the book in September. Carol’s library button showed libraries near her, not near Lena, and she asked the Tucson library to carry it. She sent the page to two people at work.

Lena did one more thing that week. She texted ADD and her husband Mark’s number, then her friend Ruth’s. Once she approved them, each could text REVIEW to her PostShop number and get the same QR code. Mark lent his copy around his office and, when it came back, held up his phone to whoever had it last. Ruth kept the QR code on a tablet at her pottery stall on Saturdays, beside the one copy she kept for people to leaf through. Every reader they reached saw the same page and the same line at the bottom.

A month later Lena’s dashboard named the places readers had asked: the shop on Fourth Street, by four different readers; her town’s library, by three; the Tucson library, by two; a bookstore in a town she had never visited, by one. She had met four of those readers. She walked into the shop on Fourth Street with a copy and introduced herself.

Every step in that chain is a button on the page.

Why the second circle matters

People trust the people they know. In Nielsen’s 2021 survey of more than 40,000 people, recommendations from people they know were the most trusted source of all, at 88 per cent.¹ A page sent by a sister arrives with that trust attached. An author asking a stranger does not.

Readers mean to review, and the steps defeat them. In one author’s survey of 93 readers, the most common reason for not reviewing was not knowing what to say, and more than eight in ten said they would review more often if they knew how much it mattered.² The reader has to remember, find the right store, sign in, find the book and find the button, alone. On Amazon the account must also have spent $50 there in the past year.³ A page that arrives from a friend, at the moment they finish, removes most of those steps.

Libraries count their own cardholders’ requests. A public library director put it plainly: patrons drive the collection, and libraries track their requests to decide what to add and whether they need more than one copy. A small-press or self-published book usually comes to a library’s attention only when its author or a patron pushes it.⁴ An author can make one request, at one library. A reader in Tucson can make one at hers.

Bookstores stock what they expect local customers to want. Stocking is a decision made on price, returns and whether the store expects the book to sell.⁵ Stores carry books people want to buy,⁶ and several different customers asking the store to carry the same book is a signal it can see for itself.

And strangers read the reviews. A review is the one part of a book page the author cannot write, which is why a reader deciding whether to try an unknown book reads them, and why BookBub’s editors weigh them when choosing which books to feature.⁷

What Lena was using

A reader page for each book. Scan the barcode on the back cover once. Amazon and Goodreads open straight on the review form; Barnes & Noble opens on the book, one tap from it.

The QR code, two ways. Tap Show the QR code on your dashboard, or text REVIEW to your PostShop number and it comes straight back. Keep it up on a tablet at a table, or print the sign and bookmarks made for each book.

Libraries and bookstores near the reader. The request pages of libraries we have checked, with the book’s details ready to paste, and independent bookstores we have checked, each with a way to ask the store to carry it: an email already written, a phone number, or the store’s own contact page.

Still reading? A reader can set a reminder for the day they expect to finish, in their own calendar or by one email.

Send it on. Every reader page ends with Know someone who’d love it?: text it to a friend, share it, or copy the link.

Your people. Text ADD and a phone number and, once you approve, that person can text REVIEW to your number and show your QR code to the readers they meet. REMOVE takes them off.

Which places were asked. Your dashboard names each library and bookstore readers asked to carry your book, and how many times. On the 15th of each month a field note arrives with one idea, written for you from those numbers. On the 1st, a report on what readers did.

Two plans

Everything above is PostShop Relay, at $29 a month.

PostShop, at $99 a month, includes all of Relay and keeps your social accounts up from the photographs and lines you send, in your own words or from a draft you approve, so the readers who follow you know you are still writing.

For the whole of Lena’s story, from the delayed flight, read it on the Silent Clamor Press Substack.