I’m taking inspiration today from a fellow Book Blogger. I’m sure I’ve scribbled a few words about this kind of thing before but Debbish wrote about A day in the life of a book blogger this week. She has a linky on her article and it occurred to me you could go across there and see what other bloggers have to say.

Free books

Yes, I get free books. I prefer pdf for two reasons. It’s cheaper for the author/publisher/publicity person. It also means I don’t end up with another book on my overloaded bookshelves. I know I can share the love and give them to little libraries or the op shop, but in reality they stay on my shelves as I don’t find time to let them go. I have boxes of miscellaneous things for the op shop which I haven’t had time to take anywhere.

I don’t get ARCs, advance reading copies, through online options. I can. I can also develop relationships with publishers and get stacks of books (possibly only a small stack). The problem with this is my time. I’m over-committed and I’m struggling to get through my To Be Read Pile. You can potentially see my To Be Read Pile in this video I submitted to Facebook. At this stage in my studies I have eight texts to read for one subject alone. Don’t get me wrong. I’m thoroughly enjoying all the reading, I’m just finding it a challenge to do all the other things I need to do and I don’t want to add the pressure of more reading into my day. If someone approaches me about reading books I often say ‘yes’.

I don’t do all the tweeting, facebooking, and putting reviews on Amazon or GoodReads that she does. I have some of it happening automatically. When I hit publish on this article it will automatically to go to Twitter and Facebook, but only once. Most of my reviews should automatically be posted to GoodReads, except I’ve not been able to figure out if this is really happening.

Reviews

I find the actual writing is generally fairly quick. Mostly it only takes a half an hour unless I’m either on a roll or having immense trouble, but the average is about a half hour. I don’t spend much time editing and I’m sure that shows. If you look again at Debbish’s writing you’ll find hers is that much more sophisticated than mine. Not just in her word choice, but also in the structure of her sentences. That’s the editing for you. I can do the same thing but I choose not to worry about that here. What you get here is mostly the raw writing. When I submit something for publishing I spend much more time on editing, even going over it ten times and also asking a friend to spend some time on it. Friends are awesome.