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?