Okay gang, gather round for a second, cause I've got a proposition for y'all. As you may have noticed, Hero doesn't get it's fair share of reviews in online fora. Oh, Butch Curry takes care of us over at Gaming Report most of the time, and Ken drops the odd Hero project into "Out of the Box," but really, the two largest repositories of online reviews on the net are ENWorld, which is (as you'd expect) D20-centric, and RPGNet, which is, well, a mixed bag at best. We've had a great deal of trouble getting our products reviewed over there, and it's starting to bug me.
So here's the proposition. Those of you out there who like to write, write up some reviews of our products. We're not looking for puff pieces- we want thoughtful, coherent reviews. We expect most will be generally positive, since we think we do pretty good books, but if you didn't like a book and have a good reason why, that works just as well.
Then, go out and get it published. RPGNet is a good place, since they're most obviously missing Hero stuff, but other sites are good, too. Pyramid even pays a little for theirs. ENWorld if you can get it, Gaming Report, Pen & Paper, wherever rpg gamers gather counts. If you can get some stuff published in print magazines and the like, that counts too, though we're not really missing those as much. And this applies even to our friends in foreign lands, though we're much more thoroughly reviewed, say, in France than we are in America when you consider the number of copies we sell in each locale.
Once you've established you can write thoughtful reviews and have the gumption to go out and get 'em published, we'll add you to our reviewer-copy mailing list. That's right, free books. As long as you keep getting reviews published, you keep getting free books. If you stop reviewing them, we'll stop sending them. It's really that simple.
"But Darren," you say, "I'm not a great writer!" Well, first off, practice writing can only help everybody. Secondly, you don't need to be Dostoevsky, or even Ken Hite, to write a review worth reading (though, hmm, anybody know if ol' Fyodor is taking submissions?) All it takes is an opinion, the ability to string together some sentences in order, and then getting off your duff and getting it submitted. And hey, once you've gotten the hang of it, you might start hearing from the Distinguished Competition about reviewing their stuff too. Go ahead, we won't tell.
Remember, it starts on your end. No free books until you review one you paid for (or acquired by other nefarious means, I suppose.) Then contact us and let us know where to find your review once you get it published, and boom! You're a reviewer, joining the long and healthy line of freeloaders currently receiving copies of choice Hero product gratis. How can you possibly pass this up? dw
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Originally Posted by Mark Taylor
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