Soooo, my approach to book reviews has been changing over the last couple of years. I started them long ago, sharing them initially through email and on a couple of discussion fora online. I played with format, adjusted them to be less “fun” and a bit more formal. I took them seriously, I spent time figuring out what I wanted to say, I read missives on how to write better reviews. Later, I formatted them for my website, I have tons in my backlog to “write”, as I both like the idea of writing down my thoughts and hate the idea of just reading something someone else put a lot of time and energy into and passing on to the next one with no more than a thought about what I just read. Maybe it’s the wannabe writer in me, hoping that a reader would take the time to think about what I wrote. To reflect on it or simply to savour the moment that the story “ends” when they finish.

I also liked the idea of sharing those reviews widely, encouraging people to comment on them, to get feedback from others who had read the same books. But all the posting, and I do mean ALL the posting, didn’t seem to increase discussion. I was posting them on multiple review sites…Amazon Canada and US (they didn’t use to be linked very well), Barnes and Noble (for both paper and Nook), Chapers, Kobo, Google Book Reviews, Library Thing, and Good Reads. I also posted to the Ottawa Public Library, Savvy Reader on Facebook and My Book Pledge. But none of it really generated any interactions that would justify the time and effort. A book review, however short, could easily take me up to 45 minutes to write, post to my website, share with all the other sites, and save for backup of my own. I also started off tagging the categories and themes and/or genre, but in recent years, I had cut that down simply to physical format (hardcover, paperback, e-book or audio), the source (new, used, library, borrowed, gift, or ARC), and if I was keeping it, in what format (ebook, paper) or what my status was (read/unread).

None of that really matters. I created the Reading Challenge, got a bunch of interaction going, and saw that much of that “tracking” that was taking time and energy was just me being too anal, anticipating people reading my reviews outside of the groups I was in yet that never really happened. I have killed my participation in a number of book groups, and it has made me go back and question what I’m doing with my book reviews. I want to keep doing “something”, but they are no longer a sample of my writing, which means they are more just relevant to me and my own thoughts, if that makes any sense.

In short, they aren’t particularly worth putting on my PolyWogg site as some sort of “collection” of book reviews, they’re more musings that should just be on my PolyBlog site. While I don’t love the idea of doing the work to MOVE them over to the PolyBlog site, it will let me streamline the process considerably. If the lists are not particularly relevant to other people, they can be part of an auto-generated list and I’ll just keep my tracking inside my OneNote file. Even that too is undergoing changes, how I keep track of what I’ve read or not.

I have 199 BRs to move, tweak and republish, which is no one’s idea of fun. But I’m not really going to do anything “new” with them, just move them and be done. I could probably do most of it in a few days, maybe a week at the most, but I’m thinking more like a couple per day. Once the conversion is done, I’ll work on publishing my new reviews only, but some of those will slip in too with far less format than I have currently. Onward!