Hey guys, here to spill some tea on this sunny and freakin’ freezing Friday morning.
So, no one has complained about this, it’s not like people have been throwing this accusation in my face, but it’s something I feel like talking about today because we do know people say this:
‘Book blogging means free books’
Yes. It does. But, when people say you do it for the free books, accuse us of being cheap, and so much more, it makes me super annoyed to the point where I feel like I’m in an anime.
So now let me roll out my rant.
There is no specific cost to being a book blogger, yes some spend more than others, yes some of use free wordpress, some of us have our own domains and self host, there’s so much variation but we tend to have one thing in common.
We love books.
Oh and another thing we have in common.
We are dedicated.
Book blogging is time consuming. There’s no lack of posts explaining just how time consuming it is either. We don’t just write posts, we think of content we revamp our sites, we do social media to some extent, and not only that but we read books, obviously.
Oh the eARCs/ARCs are free, but we also give our time for free.
Yea, I was very excited to start getting free books, I won’t lie, NetGalley is like a dangerous place for me to go because of that, but, do you know what else? I still buy books. And even if I didn’t, I write these posts and promote these books with everything I have. Sure, some of us are not as well known as others but we’re all here trying our best, FOR FREE to promote.
And it’s not the publishers and authors that accuse [not all the time or most of the time anyway lol] us of doing this for the free books, it’s people who don’t realize the effort we put in.
I’m sitting here, my house in disarray and you know what? It’s gonna stay that way because I’ve made commitments and yes sometimes we take a while to get to some of the books, and yes we will write negative reviews, but we always try.
There are graphics, twitter chat threads, bookstagram reviews, goodreads and amazon review write ups, and I sometimes get in over my head, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.
I’m also lucky enough to be in the position to buy a physical/final copy of eARC/ARC books I really enjoy. And since book blogging I definitely buy more books in my case, and I do book subscription boxes sometimes, and guess what, you don’t need to do any of that to bookblog, and if you ‘just’ review free books, that’s just as important and valid.
We do it for a love of reading, a love of books, to support authors, and if we get some free books for it, that’s no one’s place to judge.
Probably the people that need to read this won’t, but still, I’m here for my fellow book bloggers and saying, read that free book, review to your heart’s content, and keep being awesome.
