The Trouble with Books…

I’ve been an avid reader for more years than I can recall and have often spent many hours ‘coming down’ from a damn good book, marvelling in the language, the imagery, or the sheer entertainment value. But even when I was completely bowled over by a story, I wouldn’t have dreamed of putting my opinions into words, let alone sharing them with anyone else.

Publishing my own books, however, made me I realise how useful reviews can be to authors, not to mention a bit of reader feedback and good old-fashioned praise.

So I added a Review Requests page to my website and though I never advertised it anywhere, soon found I was getting a lot of requests. And yeah, that was great, but after a while I was having to turn books down – books I really wanted to read, but couldn’t possibly get to in the time-frame the authors wanted.

And then of course there’s the FAP problem – the Favourite Authors Pile. Initially, I wanted to prioritise reviews of books by indie authors, but then I thought – what about all those other writers whose work I’m already familiar with and whose books I still want to read? How do I squeeze those in too?

In the last seven months, I’ve read 44 books, and here we are almost at the end of the year and I’ve already got reviews booked up until June 2017, and that’s not counting all the books I’ve bought that aren’t even on my list.

And that’s why I’m cutting down on accepting new reads. Although of course, I’ll still be accepting new reads because there are always going to be books I can’t resist, or authors whose book launches I’m helping with and so on. So I’m not cutting down at all. In fact, all I’m doing is preventing my list of reviews-to-do stretching into 2018. At least for now.

So if anyone out there would like me to review their recent thriller, police procedural, children’s adventure or collection of horror stories, by all means drop me a line. I’ll probably say no, but I might not.