Friday, January 24, 2014

Review Requests and How to Handle Them

This post was sort of inspired by my friend Ashley's post here. Hers was strictly about turning down review requests, mine will be a little of that and a little of what happens when I do accept a review requests.

I recently had to adjust my policy so now my blog states that if I am not interested in your book, I will not respond to your request. This was probably rude as well as a bit too passive aggressive and I am not like that at all. However, I didn't have much choice as I am getting requests daily that do not fit with the parameters of what I read.Honestly, if you cannot take five minutes to look over my review policy and what I do and do not like to read, then don't bother emailing me.

It's been awhile since I actually said yes to a review request and there are reasons for that. The last few times I have accepted a request, two of the books were DNF's despite having really promising synopses and I accepted a third request and never received the book.It was a book I was looking forward to and the author had approached me about it. The final reason is because of my e-ARC's. I talked about this last week and I still feel as though I am drowning in e-ARC's. So I really want to catch up on those before I start accepting emailed requests. I mean if an author has a good pitch & the synopsis intrigued me I could probably make an exception, but it's on a case-by-case basis.

And of course I want to be able to read my own books. Books that have nothing to do with blogging. Books that I received as gifts or books that I bought for myself. I started blogging for fun and I never want it to feel like a job that I hate.I am a bit afraid that it will so I am going to do everything possible to ensure that it doesn't happen. Even taking a week off of reading review books to focus on my "me" books every once in awhile.

So how do you handle review requests?

2 comments:

  1. I don't find it rude at all. I've had it in my review policy for over a year that I will only reply if I'm interested in reviewing. Otherwise I don't reply. I find it's a waste of time, IMO. The author often tries to find a way to get me to accept anyways when I used to reply with a refusal email, and also a large number of them are sent to a blogger list now so I don't even know if authors keep track of who they email anymore. Bleh.

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  2. I've only had a few so far. The first one didn't interest me at all, and the most recent sounded nice, but I just don't have time for it. I generally take a day or two to think about it, and, since I don't receive a lot of requests, I either accept or decline politely.

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Thank you so much for your comment! I will do my best to reply to every comment that is left. This blog is an award free blog. I appreciate the thought, but I do not have the time to follow up.