A Water Cooler History of Independent Book Review by Joe Walters

I was supposed to be an English teacher. But from the moment I got behind the teacher’s desk and realized the kids didn’t want to talk about how cool Ray Bradbury was, I made a change. 

A few years and 2,800 miles later, I was serving brewery food to strangers in downtown Portland, Oregon. In my free-time, I was sneaking off to Powell’s City of Books or Stumptown Coffee to write fiction and read submissions for an online literary magazine. I wanted to write and read for a living, well aware that becoming a full-time editor for a publishing house wasn’t an easy job to come by.

But then one popped up. 

Marketing & publicity director at a small press twenty miles away. 

Pretty soon, I was trading in my non-slip shoes for a graphic t-shirt and khaki pants and frantically Googling, “What does a book marketing director do?”  I read books on marketing like Joanna Penn’s How to Market a Book, watched videos like Dave Chesson’s, fell down the longest rabbit hole I could find, and started getting creative. As a writer, I knew how much these books meant to these authors, so I worked constantly to figure out how to get them more readers. (It didn’t hurt that I liked learning about how to get more people to read in the process.)

But it wasn’t easy getting readers. There are so many books out there and just not enough platforms to review them. 

So I did something about it. For indies only. 

Eight years have passed, and over 2,000 indie authors have an extra review because of Independent Book Review. We’re recognized as a reader-friendly platform with notable end of the year book lists, starred reviews, and the coolest reading and writing newsletters around. When readers want to find great indie books, they come to us. And when authors want coverage, they don’t have to compete for publicity space with giants.

In 2025, I released my first book, The Truth About Book Reviews: An Insider’s Guide to Getting and Using Reviews to Grow Your Readership and began to appear on some of my favorite podcasts like The Creative Penn and Novel Marketing. It’s been quite a ride. I’ve graduated from editing and publishing reviews in my local Panera Bread to a cool little space in my garage in southcentral Pennsylvania. So when you’re reading this, picture me there.