Review Policy

PLEASE NOTE – I AM NOT ACCEPTING REVIEW COPIES AT THE MOMENT.

Most book bloggers are surprised to find that publishers actually want to send them books for review.  At first this is a novel idea and seems to reduce the book-buying budget – free books!  But after a few months it begins to pall.  You feel a sense of obligation to review books you didn’t really go out of your way to acquire, and worse, when you really dislike a book you’ve been sent for free you don’t enjoy writing bad things about it.

Then there’s the problem of disposal – I am not someone who like to collect books, other than a select few which seemed life-changing at the time – fortunately Britain has a vast network of charity shops who are happy to receive books, even those “uncorrected proofs”.

However, I seem to have reached a fairly happy equilibrium where most of the review requests I receive are broadly in line with my reading tastes.   So, all I ask is that publishers wanting me to review their books first browse my site for a few minutes and get an idea of whether their book would be of interest to me.

Broadly, I like “literary fiction”, history of the 20th century, literary biography, current affairs and serious travel writing.  I am particularly interested in European fiction in translation (to English of course).  And I like to support that brave band of independent publishers, some of whom are listed to the left of these paragraphs.

What I definitely don’t want is anything at all about vampires, ghosts, mysticism, astrology, ancient wisdom, secret societies that govern the earth etc, etc.

Like many book bloggers I don’t usually write reviews of books I don’t like, mainly because life is too short to even finish reading them.  So, if I review your book, the chances are you’ll be pleased with the result.  And I will also copy it to Amazon UK where  my reviews appear with a little badge saying TOP 50 REVIEWER

In response to a question from a publisher I looked at my Google Analytics reports to see how many page views I get for a review.  My top ten reviews at 2 December 2011 were as follows:

I think the average time figure shows that most people actually READ my reviews rather than just hitting and running.