I spent my morning catching up on a very interesting Twitter chat that took place last night. The topic was Book Review Bloggers. The discussion covered why certain bloggers review books, how they go about getting the books they review, and the potential benefit for the industry.
One thing that was apparent is there are different types of reviews, and as many styles of doing so as there are bloggers. To not confuse anyone who happens to find my little home here in the blogosphere, I wanted to clarify my personal position.
I love reading and writing YA books. I read a ton (as I’ve stated several times before, I average between 3-5 books a week). I spend almost all of my personal “blow money” on books and check out a half dozen books a week from my wonderful library system. I also recently started reviewing books for NetGalley. Because I love reading so much, I wanted to start sharing the books I have read, not only to document it for my own knowledge, but in the hopes to spotlight a book that maybe someone hadn’t heard of before, and in turn, get them to check it out. I want to encourage reading. Imagine me sitting in your living room, telling you, “You have to read this book!” That is why I talk about the books I do on this blog.
As a writer and a generally positive person, I do not want to spend my time reviewing a book I did not like. I don’t see the point or purpose. If I did not like it, I will not review it. If it was given to me by a publisher, I will gladly pass the book along to someone who will enjoy it.
That being said, I can see the value in pointing out minor issues I notice that may bother other people, but I will always do this surrounded my positive points. Again, if I did not like the book or found major problems with it, I will not review it.
For my Spotlights, I will give a synopsis of the story but I want to keep a SPOILER FREE zone. Sometimes that may make my spotlight sound more like a synopsis. My position is that I am presenting the book as though you’ve never heard of it before, so I will try to give background on the story itself, as well as the author, and conclude with as many of own my personal opinions as I can without giving away spoilers.
Finally, for clarification purposes, from now on I will refer to my reviews as “Spotlights.” I understand that a true review will probably try to give a much more balanced approach, pointing out more negatives than I would feel comfortable doing, and I don’t want to confuse my purpose in sharing these posts on a weekly basis.
I enjoy writing these spotlights and hope you will continue to enjoy reading them. They will continue to be shared on Thursdays. In addition, I am going to vary my Tuesday schedule between additional Book Spotlights and Truthful Tuesday posts. I am finding the writing of these spotlights a helpful exercise in my own writing, and by doing them more frequently, I can keep up with my reading much easier.
Happy Writing . . . and Reading!
