Indie Story Geek is a place to highlight amazing indie books, whether they are self-published, web serials, or published by small presses. Since the reader experience can be so subjective, we’ve broken down the reading experience into eight different criteria using Kriti Khare’s system from Armed With a Book. Anyone can submit a story for review. When reviewers submit their review, they can optionally include a link back to their full review on their own blog.
Readers, simply click on Browse and input any categories you prefer for age-range or genre. A list of books will show up with a “story shape” visualizing the average scores for the book over those eight criteria with a radar chart. If you as a reader find yourself gravitating toward a certain type of book, the story shapes should help you find something to fit that preference! When you click on the book, you’ll go to the book page, where you can find the average scores for the book experience broken down, as well as individual book experience scores from each reviewer, along with a link to a more in-depth review if they’ve chosen to include one.
Reviewers and authors, sign up for an account, and you will be able to search for a book, and if it’s not in our listing yet, you can submit stories for review. Once a moderator has reviewed them for accuracy, they will show up in the listing and reviewers can add their review with the book experience scores as well as an optional link to an in-depth review on your own site.
Indie authors can get more exposure, book reviewers can get more traffic, and readers can find a book for their tastes! This is Indie Story Geek.
How we started: S. Kaeth had a few conversations with other indie authors about visibility and the stigma of indie books as “bad quality”. In chatting with Kriti Khare, SK and Kriti discussed the subjectivity of the reading experience and the limitations of 5 star reviews, and fortunately Kriti had already come up with a system. SK’s husband went to work designing a database system, incorporating Kriti’s book experience scales, and creating a website to collect books and hopefully make it easy for readers to find their next great indie read!
For more helpful indie resources, see https://indieresourcedirectory.com.
Contact us if you have any questions or technical issues.