The Book of Ratings Now on Pre-Order

To be released Nov. 17

The Book of Ratings (Annotated and Expanded) is now available for preorder! Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't allow pre-orders on paperback books, but the paperback will be available on the same day as the ebook: November 17.

The Book of Ratings (2024)

Since this is Substack, I’ll share a bit of detail about the process.

This is my first self-published book, and it’s an updated version of The Book of Ratings: Opinions, Grades, and Assessments of Everything Worth Thinking About, which was published in 2002. A lot of water has gone under the information superhighway since then, so I’ve added a bunch of annotations talking about, and joking about, the fall of airline catalogs, the rise of “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” and what Boba Fett’s been up to lately.

The major expense for this has been hiring a proofreader, because it’s the one job I know I can’t do myself. Not that I can’t proofread, I’ve actually worked as a copy editor, but no author can proofread their own book. You’re just too close to it, and your brain is too primed to read what you think you wrote rather than what’s on the page.

I also have a background in graphic design, so I designed the cover myself. To me, nothing is sadder than a self-published book with an amateurish cover. And, no offense to the good people at Random House, I was never that fond of the cover to the first version. A lot of people thought it was a reference book.

The Book of Ratings (2002)

My hope is that the new subtitle and colorful artwork will make it at least a little more clear that the book is humor, and give people a better sense of what sort of humor to expect.

The background of the table and cards is a licensed stock image, as are the red letter grades. I was hoping to hire an illustrator, but lacking time and money, I decided to give it a go myself. I have worked as a cartoonist (I’ve worked as a lot of things, as you can see) but I haven’t done nearly as much drawing in a semi-realistic style. I’ll be honest, the individual drawings aren’t as slick as I’d like them to be. I think, for instance, that the drawing of a vampire would be terrible if it was the main image for a novel about vampires, but I’m hoping the less-than-pro quality of the art works with the idea that these are papers being graded.

As of this writing, I’m still working on the wraparound cover for the paperback and the front matter. There are a lot of little things that need to get done, but I have plenty of time to do them before I send the final version to Amazon.

I’m excited to see this book come out, and I hope you are too. Thanks for reading.