Confessions of a Book Reviewer Part One: The First Line

Virgin queen bees take what is known as a "nuptial flight" sometime within the first week or two after emerging from the pupal chamber. The new queen flies out of the hive and begins to produce a perfume-like substance called a "pheromone." The drones in the area are attracted to the pheromone and the queen will mate with as many as 20 of them.
-Arizona State University, Department of Agriculture. agriculture.state.az.us

Authors beware!
When you send me your book for review I don’t just read it. I try to find the pheromone in it.
Why?
With a BFA in Architectural Studies/Book Arts(dual degree,) ten years of newspaper editorial experience, fifteen years writing book reviews for national magazines, college literary journals and local press, my ego wants to have the best hive at Suite101.com and find the good stuff before anyone else. I want to be the Queen Bee in fiction reviews.
And lately, I’ve been thinking about dividing the colony and killing all the couch potato drones, because lazy writing is destroying the industry. Or at least making me sick.
When I receive media mail from my DHL crush, or my UPS crush or that skinny USPS postman that would rather stick a ms on top of my mailbox then step out of the truck and drop it at my door I don’t open the book. I just place it at the bottom of the stack of books and ms that pile behind my sofa and wait…for about five minutes and then I open the book to the first page.
Why?
Because by now I can look at a book and tell in one minute whether it is going to cost my two nice days of fun reading or two months of gut wrenching torture.
Now don’t take what I write here as a reviewer rant, but take it as a note on what I do and my technique on how I do it, so in the future you can decide if you want to receive a review from me(if you have the choice) or if you want to learn a little something about what a reviewer can do for you.
I cannot speak for every reviewer, so I open the door for discussion and will only tell you about myself.
I am a book reviewer, who mostly reviews for publicists, publishing houses, bookstores, and the occasional literary review, trade journal, some national print magazines and some ezines. In short, I review for just about anything.
Why am I important to an author? I cannot tell you whether a particular publishing house will take your manuscript, but I can tell you whether or not it has big buzz potential. I can tell you, which publishing house is a good fit for your work. I am almost (very, very close) to the point where I can tell you which editor will take your ms. But I am not an agent. And my suggestions are not guarantees or free.
I’ll review for free…maybe, but I won’t consult for free. So don’t blow my email up with manuscripts to review. Please.
But let’s look at what I can do free a charge and without fail—I can tell you if your book has big buzz potential in one minute. Big buzz potential is the ability to generate free good publicity from the people you need to back your book—in house marketing/publicists, your editors and the publishing house, and people you want to back your book—book store owners, reviewers, book club presidents. And I can produce my own version of literary pheromone. I can talk your book up to my editors, to my book club president friends and to some of the radio personalities, ministers, and magazine publishers that I know.
How?
With First Lines.

Click on the title to read my article in entirety.

Writing to see what the end gon' be.

Dee