TSS: A Day In The Life of A Book Reviewer: Book Mail!

I frequently get questions about how I blog, why I blog, etc. Since I tend to answer the same questions repeatedly, I thought it easier to create a feature that focuses on these questions.

For this first “edition,” thanks to the suggestion of Jennifer of The Literate Housewife, I’m going to walk you through the “book mail” process.

On a given week, I receive 10-15 review titles a week. This has actually gone down considerably with the advent of egalley/electronic review copies. Prior to this, it was more like 25-30 copies a week.  So what do I do with all these books? How do I decide which books to keep?

Pictured here are the books received the month of January. In total? 43 books received.  I typically wait until a few stacks of books have accumulated on my desk before I decide to go through them.  Then I follow this process:

1. Immediately sort into two piles: solicited books (those I accepted for review consideration) and unsolicited (those sent to me randomly by publishers/authors).  In this particular case, only 10 were solicited, the remaining were unsolicited.

2. I sort through the unsolicited review titles to determine if any of these titles grab my attention/interest & are moved into the “review consideration” pile. In this case, I only decided to keep 3 of the 30 unsolicited titles.

3. I log the titles in the review consideration pile into my review spreadsheet.  Information I enter includes the following:  book title information (title, author, publisher, publicist, publication date),  how it was obtained (solicited or unsolicited).

4. Titles for review consideration are logged into my review calendar. This is just a very general, not formal way of keeping track of when I might review a particular title. It allows me to see how heavy my review load is for a particular week or month.  A post-it with the tentative review date is inserted into the book.

5. Books are added to my review shelves. This red shelf (it rotates!) holds two months of review titles.

All in all, in this case, 13 of 43 books were kept for review consideration.  This is a pretty typical month.  Books I’ve purged are either donated (schools, shelters, etc.) or I take them to my monthly book club meeting. Just as I finish sorting one round of books, more books start coming in, a never-ending process!

Any questions?

I hope to continue this feature on a fairly regular basis. What questions do you have about book reviewing, blogging, etc? Feel free to ask them below in the comments or send me an email!