So today’s discussion post is something that used to come up all the time when I was on Goodreads, and has happened a couple of times here: interacting with authors. On Goodreads it was nearly always a bad experience, though Tony Hays (author of Arthurian mysteries) was great and a couple of others too, plus of course authors who just wanted to offer me a copy of their books to review. But quite often the author would come by to argue with my rating.

There’s always exceptions, so it’s hard to come up with simple rules. But here’s a couple I think authors could stick to:

• Don’t react to reviews unless people have indicated they’re willing to discuss them with you.
• Don’t spam people with offers of copies to review.
• Don’t spam people with anything.
• Don’t make everything about your book — other interactions may not seem like they’re directly gonna sell your book, but I’m more likely to buy your book if I’ve had meaningful interactions with you. Even if that’s about other books. Maybe especially if that’s about other books.
• Remember that nobody owes you interaction, nobody owes you an explanation, nobody owes you their time.

Buuut sometimes I think reviews could use some rules in reply. Mostly I think they’re common sense, but then someone always comes along and ruins my idealistic dreams. So hey:

• Don’t beg for freebies.
• Don’t draw the author’s attention to a review unless they’ve indicated they’re interested in reading reviews of their work.
• Remember there’s a difference between the author’s voice and their character’s voice and even, depending on the narratorial choices they’ve made, their real opinions.
• Don’t, for goodness’ sake, proudly announce that you’ve pirated the author’s book. There are some authors who don’t mind this much (Cory Doctorow) or have found that their books sold better after one was available free (Neil Gaiman). But for the most part, you’re telling them that they’ve lost revenue. Even if it wasn’t illegal (it is), then telling people you’ve pirated is just poor taste.
• Review the book, not the author. (It’s fair not to read something because the author is a raging homophobe, but then you don’t need to review the book, because even doing that is getting them oxygen to keep on raging to an audience.) Sometimes biographical details can be important in understanding a book, and sometimes you’re just making douchy assumptions or being a bully.

…Not that this is an exhaustive list (either of them, actually), but these are some of my pet hates.

How about you?

This one is a topic that tends to divide bibliophiles: deciding not to finish a book.

I’ll admit, I’m often torn. On the one hand, why should I put in the time on something I’m not actually enjoying? On the other, I usually paid for it or went to some inconvenience like getting on a bus to get on a train to get to a library in order to get the book. Or I’m meant to be reviewing it because I received it free.

My ultimate decision was that I can DNF a book if I’m not enjoying it, and I can still write reviews in that case too — after all, it can be useful to know what made another reader’s interest flag — as long as I state that I didn’t finish the book. Sometimes to write a proper review, I skim through to the end anyway; I’ll usually mention that too.

In the end, it’s come down to my Golden Rule of Reading: reading is not work. I’ve read voraciously my whole life as an escape, as a way to visit new places and meet new people. No matter what, I don’t want to compromise that joy in books with a feeling of obligation. Reading is a pleasure that’s always going to be there for me, as long as I don’t make it into a job (I have one of those; well, several, since I’m a freelancer/contractor).

I get the feeling of obligation, I do. And I get those books that you love to hate, too, or feeling like you should give something a chance. But unless you need to read something for a class, why are you doing something in your free time that solely feels like a chore? If you’re not enjoying it at all — if you’re reading only to be finished… I don’t see why you shouldn’t stop now, and read something you’d like better. At least, that’s the way it works out for me, after years of feeling a sort of moral obligation to finish books.

How about you? Do you let yourself DNF?

The affiliate link experiment on The Bibliophibian is over.

It just wasn’t working. People would tell me they never click on affiliate links anyway, that they don’t trust them, and that it feels too much like advertising. I can get that, but I’d really hoped for enough to pay for my domain name and such, at least. A book or two now and then. As it stands, after several months of the experiment (I think it might be coming up to six months?) I haven’t yet earned enough for any of the affiliates to pay out, and they’re always looking for a reason to refuse to even credit my account with the amount purchased.

So, affiliates are gone now. I’ll slowly scrub them from the previous posts, and get rid of them from my sidebar, etc, etc.

I’m really disappointed though. Blogging is my hobby, but it’s a hobby that has started to take over a serious amount of my life, just while I’m also doing a full time degree and working several jobs as a contractor. As a UK-based blogger, I don’t even get that many free books from publishers. I’d hoped that I could get enough through affiliate links to make it sustainable — and get a bit back from readers who find my reviews worthwhile or interesting without ever costing them anything.

What I will be doing instead is putting up a Ko-fi link. If sometimes you feel I’ve written an interesting post or made you want to really read a book or just been a nice person, feel free to buy me a coffee or three (well, it’s most likely to be a coke, for me). It’s something I try to do while I’m out and about, to show my appreciation for the work people do on their blogs. Some of us spend a lot of time on it, and it’s worth doing something to say ‘thanks’, right?

The point is, blogging can be work, and if we appreciate work, we ought to support it. So that’s my pledge from now on — use affiliate links, donate via Ko-fi, don’t block ads on my favourite blogs if they’re not intrusive…

Personally, I run on cola. Cherry cola, even. I know, I know, I’m a heathen. What’s your poison?

ETA: I’ve also stopped offering a Kofi link, since it wasn’t something anyone used and it resulted in at least one strange situation.

This is your opportunity to get me to read something, anything, you think I really ought to read. There’s just one catch.

It has to be from my backlog.

Quick access links:

–2011 Backlog.
–2012 Backlog.
–2013 Backlog.
–2014 Backlog.
–2015 Backlog.
–2016 Backlog.
–2017 Backlog.

So pick a favourite book, or something you’d like to hear my thoughts on, and ‘sell’ me it by letting me know exactly why it’s interesting or exciting or toe-curlingly awesome. In return, I promise I will endeavour to read it within a month of this post, unless I get so many responses that it’s unfeasible (unlikely, given my usual commenting rate on here).

(Hint: if you think of something but you’re not sure if I own it, you could just use my blog’s search function. That also goes for checking whether I’ve already read it.)

Yes, this is a shameless way of trying to get myself excited about books I might’ve forgotten all about.

Some examples from my friends elsewebs

Ryan @ SpecFic Junkie:

I’m reading Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are [Frans de Waal]?_ right now, and while it has some overlap with The Bonobo and the Atheist with regards to animal data and anecdotes, it’s got a whole bunch of new stuff and feels great.

Saga: Volume 6 [Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples] I haven’t read yet, but I WILL READ WITH YOU because SAGA

The Ghost Brigades [John Scalzi] is a good read, fun Scalzi time, but I mostly recommend it because The Lost Colony is as good as Old Man’s War and I’ve got reviews here.

I’m currently re-reading God’s War [Kameron Hurley] and alkjdflkasjdf loving it more than the first time I read it. Bug-magic, queerness, a society that’s predominantly female and racism and war and it’s really, really good.

Zoo City [Lauren Beukes] was really, really good. An unfiltered take on a non-Western world with non-Western magic and unf.

redphoenix of Habitica: 

I read Caraval [Stephanie Garber] recently. If you enjoyed the worldbuilding of the Night Circus [Erin Morgenstern], it’s in a very similar vein and I found the plot to be less predictable than Night Circus’s (but thoroughly enjoyed both!). Additional note for Caraval: the emotional driving force for that book is the character’s love for her sister. As someone with younger sister, I could definitely relate, and the plot doesn’t just treat the sister as a macguffin.

Arabella of Mars [David D. Levine] is a pitch perfect Victorian-era-girls-having-adventures romp (and we were on a panel with the author of that book at the Nebula conference last year)

I thoroughly enjoyed Jade City [Fonda Lee] (NB I read more than one Godfather book and also lots of martial arts; it was great to read something of both over-the-top genres so I’d be curious as to what you thought of it)

Ghost Talkers [Mary Robinette Kowal] made me cry and miss my husband, so you may also want to time that for proximity to Lisa. It _sucked_ not to be able to go find him for comfort snuggles.

Sparrow Hill Road [Seanan McGuire] is one of my desert island books!!!

If you dream of flying or paragliding, Updraft [Fran Wilde] is perfect (with some solid aerodynamics)

Lemoness of Habitica:

Seconding Ghost Talkers <3

Across the Wall [Garth Nix] is a collection so not all of them are equally good but there were a few in there that I thoroughly enjoyed!!

SIX OF CROWS [Leigh Bardugo]. PLEASE READ SIX OF CROWS. The pace is excellent, the characters are complex and compelling, and it really does feel like the most satisfying of heists in terms of the way information is withheld and revealed. I will say that Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom are really two halves of a whole, so I’d have them both on hand to read at once!!

Blwyddyn Newydd Dda i bawb!

That is, Happy New Year to everyone, if you don’t speak Welsh. (It’s okay. Neither do I.)

I’m not sure how many people will be interested in this, but I saw Chuckles’ pie charts and decided I rather liked the idea — if nothing else, for the sake of self-reflection! I’ve tried not to be too excessive, though. Below you’ll find a line graph showing how many books I read per month, and then for comparison, how many points I earned in Game of Books for each month. Below that there’s a pie chart showing what genres I’ve been reading, and another showing the sources of the books I read. You can click to embiggen. I used this site to make my graphs.

A note on how I calculated genres: on the rare occasions when a book was hard to pin down, I marked it in multiple genres, but for the most part I assigned each book a single genre.

Other stats:

Total read: 311
Number of rereads: 21
Total page count: 56,886
Most-read genre per month:

• January: Fantasy
• February: Science
• March: Science
• April: Fantasy
• May: Science
• June: Science
• July: Fantasy
• August: History
• September: Fantasy
• October: Science
• November: Fantasy
• December: History

Number of ratings:

• Five stars: 16
• Four stars: 155
• Three stars: 105
• Two stars: 29
• One star: 6

I was a bit surprised by some of this — clearly my comics consumption has been hit hard by the fact that I was boycotting Marvel while Steve Rogers was a Nazi. My non-fiction consumption has gone sharply up, but given I’m in my third year of a science degree, I’m not terribly surprised by the amount of science I’m reading. SF was a sizeable genre throughout the year, but never beat out non-fiction or fantasy for being the most read in a single month.

Perhaps most surprising to me was the fact that I’ve actually read quite a bit of horror this year. It’s not really my kind of genre at all!

This is probably the least amount I’ve read in terms of total number of books in many years, but I have tackled my backlog somewhat and kept much more on top of reading the books I bought than usual. Game of Books worked out well, prompting me to read books that had been hanging around for longer, but I can always do better next year. (And yes, Game of Books is returning; I’ll make the spreadsheet later today, but probably won’t post about it until tomorrow. Let me know if you need a link sooner!)

It’s been a rough year in some ways, but we’ve survived it and here we are. Here’s to 2018 — may it bring us all joy (and many books).