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?
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.
ReplyDeleteI'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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