What you should include in your review request to make it easier for both of us
At Toka Box, we only publish book reviews and feature books from publishers, authors and illustrators who identify as South Asian and books that we think are relevant to our audiences.
We also adhere to a certain standard in terms of writing, illustration and production value.
If you want us to review your book, please send us either one of the following
- An e-copy
- A hard copy
Sending us your book does not guarantee a review from us.
There are many reasons why we read a book and decide that we won’t review it. It could be one of the following reasons:
- If we think that the book is not relevant to our readers
- If we feel that the book doesn’t meet our standards and guidelines.
- If we didn’t connect enough with a book. We are passionate about children’s literature and we want to bring the best books to our readers.
We don’t publish outrightly negative reviews. If you want us to tell you why the book didn’t work for us, we’d be happy to send you a short and structured feedback.
When we do publish a review, we would like to be as creative and articulate as possible, and many times, we would also like to point out aspects of the books that we feel could be improved. We value our freedom of expression greatly and we won’t change a review’s slant if it doesn’t please a publisher or a reviewer. We also like to have complete control over our reviews — in terms of how we interpret a text or even the number of words we use for a review. However, we don’t publish outright negative reviews.
We do not guarantee monetary conversions or direct marketing outcomes from our reviews. A book review or a blog post on a book is only a small part in what should be a well-planned marketing campaign and on its own doesn’t guarantee direct conversions.
We also run the following on our website:
Author interviews
Book Launches
Contests and Giveaways
Exclusive book cover reveals
Instagram takeovers by children’s authors
Again, with our social media campaigns, we do not guarantee numbers in likes and shares. We believe in promoting our posts and material organically. Having said that, so many books have received word-of-mouth buzz and huge contest engagement based on our campaigns. Some of the well-known ones have been Natasha Sharma’s book from Harper-Collins, newbie author Sowmya Putta’s debut book , and so many more.
Towards the end of the year, we will have the Top 10 South Asian Books list. We will pick the best books out of all the books we have reviewed the previous year. The deadline to submit your book to us for award consideration is Nov 15.
With Toka Box, sending us a book does not mean that we will feature it in our boxes. If we do like it but cannot find a place for it in our boxes, we will post a review (see above for review guidelines) or even choose include it in our curated Toka Shop.
We will not publish reviews of books that are on Kindle Unlimited or are available for free online or on Amazon Kindle.
