…emails me with review requests,

Over here at The Book Scoop, I still consider myself pretty new to the Young Adult community. I’m coming up on my one year blogoversary in the next couple of months and I’ve been fortunate enough to receive quite a few review requests from authors, publicists and assistants to authors.

It’s a definite treat to get free books for review and I’m not going to lie and say I don’t get a little excited when I get those S&S Galley Grab emails or review requests for books that I’ve been absolutely dying to get my hands on. I love it. It’s one of the perks of book blogging. I work pretty hard on this blog and it shows with the review requests that I get.

However, this post isn’t about me being excited over review requests. It’s about bringing attention to my Review Policy.

I wrote my review policy because I was getting a lot of review requests from self published authors and right now, I’m not dealing with the drama that comes from all that right now. The reason for this is because of this and this. Yep, the reviewer in both of those posts was me and those are just the more recent reviews/drama posts that I’ve been apart of. I’m pretty easy to please but sometimes stories or characters don’t work for me and my enjoyment of the story falls flat on its face. It just happens that way with everyone and one of the things that I promised myself when I first started reviewing that I would always be honest in my reviews and I’ve stuck to that.

One thing you can always count on from my reviews is that they’re honest and will always be about the book. I may talk crap about the characters if they pissed me off or I may not fall in love with a book but everything I say in my reviews are exactly how I feel about each book. You won’t find my trashing an authors political/religious beliefs or cracking jokes about their looks or whatever, it’s never personal about the author. I’ll be the first to say that my reviews are for readers. If you read my blog posts, it’s exactly like having a conversation about the book with me. This is how I talk (run on sentences and all), this is all real. It’s all me.

I’ve had bad experiences with self published authors or small press authors and I’m really just fed up with dealing with all of that drama. I don’t want to have deal with all of that nonsense so I’ve chosen to stay away from small press or self published authors. I know that it kind of sucks for the self published authors who may have written the best book ever but because I’ve been burned more than twice, I’m kind of over it.

I’m writing this post because I’m still getting a lot of review requests from self published authors. So really, this letter is for you guys. Everything you need to know about the kind of blog I run, the kind of books I read for this blog and what I’m not accepting is all in my review policy. Please, I beg of you, read it and if your book seems like a good fit for this blog then feel free to email me.

Thank you, I really appreciate it.