The Book Blogger Hop was originally created by Jennifer @ Crazy-For-Books in March 2010 and ended on December 31, 2012. With Jennifer’s permission, Coffee Addicted Writer relaunched the hop on February 15, 2013. Each week the hop will start on a Friday and end the following Thursday. There will be a weekly prompt featuring a book related question. The hop’s purpose is to give bloggers a chance to follow other blogs, learn about new books, befriend other bloggers, and receive new followers to your own blog.
The Book Blogger Hop post image was created by Coffee Addicted Writer.
This Week’s Question
Do you post your reviews before publication day or wait until close to or on publication date? (Elizabeth @Â Silver’s Reviews)
This question is geared towards reviews of advanced reader copies (ARCs) rather than backlist books. While I try to read and review my NetGalley ARCs before their publication date, lately I haven’t met that personal deadline. I overzealously requested a lot of ARCs last winter because I found a lot of books of interest. Fortunately many publishers approved my requests. But this resulted in an unexpected backlog of my own creation, which I’m currently still digging myself out of.
Ideally I like to review them close to publication day rather than way before or way afterward. I managed to do so for a couple of recently published books: KAIKEYI by Vaishnavi Patel and THE STARDUST THIEF by Chelsea Abdullah. But my reality is that I published most of my ARC reviews after their publication date. Luckily most of the ARCs left in my queue haven’t yet hit shelves. So there’s a chance I’ll be able to push out a few more reviews prior to the books’ publication dates.
Though this isn’t something I pay attention to on my own blog, I have seen commentary from Pages Unbound that they get less post views about ARCs than they do for backlist reviews or discussion posts. I don’t factor that into my decision on when to post my ARC reviews since I’m usually running behind. But perhaps others do. And I can certainly understand why ARC reviews might get less traffic initially. I imagine it might have something to do with interested readers trying to avoid spoilers before reading the book. Personally, I fall into that boat.
If you have any thoughts on the matter, let me know in the comments!
I’ve pretty much stopped requesting arcs. I’m such a mood reader that I don’t want to be obligated to review something that I had to force myself to read to meet a deadline
That’s fair! If that’s what works for you then that’s great! 🙂
I usually try to do my ARC reviews sometime in the month before publication because I thought I read several years ago that publishers like that. And if you publish it WAY ahead of publication, people might not really be interested in or have heard of the book yet. But I definitely get more views on reviews that are after the publication date. I personally like to read reviews of books I have already read myself, and I guess that’s true for other people, too. Or maybe they’re just more likely to have heard of the book and want to read a review of it, if the book has been released and a lot of people are talking about it.
To be honest I haven’t checked to see on NG if the publishers have a preference. Every now and then an approval will come through with special instructions, usually about holding off on posting a review until a certain time frame. Even rarer is when the publisher sends an email reminding everyone the book is out and that they hope to see a review soon. I know that happened with one book, maybe two.
Like you, I also usually stick to reading reviews of books I’ve already read. If I know I won’t read a book, then I have no qualms reading reviews for those as well. I do try to boost reviews of newer books, too, so to avoid spoilers, but also make sure I like the content, I do a quick skim read.
If it’s an ARC review, I usually post the Goodreads review as soon as that’s ready, and then other content goes out the week of the ARC release. I try to always have the review ready before deadline and that’s worked (so far)?
And of course, with backlist stuff that’s really not possible unless you can time travel…
Ooo if only we could time travel! Dr. Who makes it look fun (an perilous), anyway! 😛
That’s awesome you’re able to get your reviews up somewhere before or around the week of the release. I hope to get back into that pattern later this year.
I love to draft up my review before the pub date if possible, but posting needs me to take into consideration all kinds of schedules, and depends on when the publisher requires me to put it up online!
So sorry for my delayed reply, I was out of town! I’m totally with you on drafting one’s review before the pub date…I’d love to be able to do that, but trying to dig myself out of my hole first haha!