Babble from a Book Nerd: A Letter to Authors and Publishers

To the authors and publishers that I have received books from,

            I am a failure. There are different variations of the word failure, but the specific definition that I will be using is stated as "nonperformance of something due, required, or expected." You see, a while ago I received a tidal wave of requests for me to review books. At the time I was thrilled. I had lots of time on my hands, and I was going through books like crazy. But then things changed.

            You see, I have been the victim of several bad reading slumps since I first started blogging (what, three years ago?). And every time that I fell into one, my rhythm for reviewing books went completely out the window. And it's so hard to be good about something again once you've been bad for a while. It's like starting to eat healthy again after only eating french fries, cake, candy, and chips for two months. It's hard to get back into the rhythm, but I'm not trying to use this as an excuse.

            Life got really busy. With school work becoming more difficult, my heath declining again; I lost most of that free time that I talked about earlier. And, knowing me, I kept accepting books. I'm in no way a perfectionist, but I do have trouble saying no to people. Soon, this lead to a build up of books that I needed to review, but didn't have the time, energy, or motivation to even find a book to start with. Again, I will say that this is not an excuse. Because in reality, I feel a lot of guilt over this.

            I try to stick to my promises, and by accepting books from you, I made a promise to read and write a review for said books. Well, here we are, and it has probably been six or more months since you last heard from me about my review. You might think that I just did everything to get free books, or that I'm a lazy or bad reviewer, and while the second one may be true, I can assure you that the first one is not. Because life happens, and life really got into the way of my reading.

            So now we come to the question, what do we do now? Well, I have seen reviewers do three different things. The first is email authors and publishers, apologize, and then not review the books. The second is to read and review the books, even though they are getting everything in late. And the third is to just forget about them. To say, you know what, life got crazy. I really don't want to leave the books not reviewed. Because if I did that I know that I would feel really guilty about it.

            I know that I have a lot of books to review, and I know that it's going to be really hard, but I want to do it. I NEED to do it. So, I guess that I wrote this to say that I was sorry. I'll try to do better in the future.

Your failure of a reviewer,
Anna