Utility Room

A ‘laundry basket’ of tidbits where all the confusion gets ‘washed away’ and your questions get ‘ironed out’…

Do you get paid for writing reviews?

Absolutely not! I write reviews because I WANT to write reviews. At times, I am offered a book free for review. The authors/publishers give me this book with FULL KNOWLEDGE that sending me a book does not promise that they will receive a review and if I do choose to review it, it will be a complete and honest review. The opinions on this website are mine and mine alone, unless the post is a guest review from an author or fellow blogger.

Where do the links send me?

This is a good time to tell y’all that I am not affiliated with any company or person. Any links that I post are ones that I have used in order to help you easily find what I am talking about (books lead to Goodreads, TV/Movies and the people that star in them lead to IMDB or Wikipedia, company names lead directly to their websites, items that I have purchased lead to their link on Amazon). I receive NO money or benefit from these links, and again, they are placed there simply to help you.

Do you use a rating system?

In the past, I have used a star rating because the places I posted reviews required that. Here I do not, and with good reason: There are just too many meanings for that star rating, even among book review sites. That leads to a lot of confusion and hurt feelings. For example, I have always believed that a 3-star rating was a middle ground, with 4-stars and 5-stars being good/great and 2-stars and 1-stars meaning poor/bad. I also get very… annoyed, we could say… when people ONLY use that star-rating, rather than explaining what they liked and did not like about a book, and because of this, those star-ratings can be very misleading. Therefore, I have made the personal decision to review books rather than rate books, especially since something that I loathe (therefore a 1 star review) could be something that you absolutely love (therefore a 5 star review) and vice versa.

Do you review anywhere else?

Once upon a time, I reviewed on Amazon, Goodreads, and BookLikes. Over time, I have chosen to stick strictly to my blog unless an author has specifically asked me to review elsewhere and I have agreed to do so. I may change my mind about this in the future and go back to reviewing on other sites, but at this time they do not work for me. I do have a post on here that is updated often (maybe not as often as it should) with what I’m reading and I still use Goodreads to keep track of what I have read during the year.

How can I get you to review my book?

That’s easy. I have a contact form on here that you can fill out with information on yourself and your book. Sometimes it may take me a little bit to get back to you, depending on what is going on in my life, but I try very hard to get back to people within a week. And we can go from there…