That Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means

I'm at it again. But this time, my rant is in response to specific comments on the following IABB Confession. Now I've been sitting on this blog post for a while because I figure y'all won't take the time to sift through several weeks of posts from IABB to find this specific confession to figure out who said what I'm responding to, and don't take that as a challenge please. And if you're new or unfamiliar with IABB Confessions, they are submitted anonymously and IABB and the graphics artists are not responsible for the content of the confessions. They merely provide the platform for their airing.

Like I mentioned above, this rant is about a comment to this confession, because I 157% agree with this confession, and not just because I'm a blogger. There have definitely been blogger confessions that made me go "WTF Batman?" Because there are things that other bloggers do or want to see that just don't make sense to me personally. Surprisingly, we bloggers are not all the same. Weird, I know. 

But anyway, the following quote is the comment in response to this confession that I feel the strong need to address in this rant. 

"Dear Confessor,

You signed up knowing full well the release date.... if this wasn't a commitment you could make... you shouldn't have signed up. You also signed up seeing and knowing the damn due date... don't be so pretentious."

So first of all, it seems to me that this commenter is operating under the belief that all book reviews are obtained through blog tours sponsored by PR companies (or personally hosted by the authors because there are some authors that set up their own blog tours and stuff). So we're talking those Google doc signups that I have very specifically asked I not receive on my Review Policy page. Most of the emails that I receive adhere to that request, and I still somewhat regularly get emails with review requests (they've kind of tapered off lately, so I suspect authors are realizing that it's been a long time since I posted a review for a book that I didn't either proofread or win through Goodreads. I do need to get better at rotating in some books that I received requests for, but that's irrelevant to the topic at hand.) The thing is, since the inception of this blog over three years ago, we have consistently received review requests that were not connected with any type of blog tour, starting within the first week of our existence. 

Now it took a while to get our feet wet and figure out our personal limitations, but it didn't take long for me to start sending replies to authors that included lines like, "I'd love to receive a review copy of your book. I'm currently booked with reviews for the next month however, so I couldn't possibly get to it until (insert date here). If you don't mind waiting that long for a review, I will certainly add you to my list." And that is probably EXACTLY what the blogger who submitted this confession has done (word choice may vary.) That's at least the impression I get from the confession. The point is that the confessor clearly stated their review timeline before receiving the review copy. By sending the book, the author was agreeing to that timeline. I know my own brain likes to get very contrarian with things at times, so I can absolutely understand the confessor not even wanting to pick up the book after being hounded for a review that they had already stated would take a few weeks. 

At this point in time (because I actually started writing this post around five years ago and then life happened), I still receive review requests at my blog email (although they are much fewer and way further between because this blog has been mostly inactive for two years), and I would still personally be telling people that a review for their book would be a ways out, if I were entertaining those requests in the first place (but most of them were sent closer to the beginning of the year and I'm only just now seeing them now that I'm getting my life back together). But even after all this time, I'm still irked by the commenter that I quoted. Even if the confessor had signed up for a review tour, if they only received the book a few days before its release, the author has no reason to expect all the reviews to be ready on time. Bloggers have lives outside of our blogs, we typically have jobs, and sometimes life just happens. If you, as an author, want blog reviews posted as a book releases, then you need to supply it to bloggers weeks in advance so they have time to read it and write an adequate review. The confessor isn't being pretentious. They're merely asking authors to save everyone some time and pay attention to the responses we as bloggers send agreeing to reviews. - Katie