Much has been going on this month for me. I’m still chipping away at horror novel WIP#5, which is up to around 43,000 words. I released an ebook version of my 80 poem poetry collections, The Redundancy of Tautology, which Dr Agarwal at Cyberwit Publishing (who published the paperback version of the collection back in April 2021) kindly supplied the cover artwork for. My hubby and I also released Midsummer Madness 2022 as the first creative writing anthology after the big rebranding of our literary journal, Bindweed Magazine, that we’ve been running since 2016. In between all of these things, I still made time for reading. Here’s my latest book shopping haul:
Did you know that I have an author account on Goodreads, but I also have a separate reader account that I use to post my reviews of Indie books? Yep, and I keep this account separate from my author brand for two reasons: 1) It allows me to post honest reviews of the books I read; 2) It keeps my own books as an author separate from the ones I review.
I’ve had a few requests for ARC reviews through my reader account, all of which I do under a pseudonym. A lot to manage, but I enjoy it, and like to help Indie authors out by reviewing their books. It’s hard enough to get people to review books in the first place, so I like to do my bit to help other authors gain more visibility for their books.
Of course, most of the books in the picture above are by well-known authors, and my personal policy is that I tend to review books with upwards of 100 ratings on my main author Goodreads account, which isn’t connected to my Amazon account (the Indie reader account that I run is connected to Amazon and I post all Indie reviews on Amazon too). Why do I do that and not post on Amazon for big names? For the simple reason that they already have thousands of reviews: I’d rather post reviews of Indie books on Amazon to help smaller, unknown authors to spread the word about their books. After all, that’s what I like other readers to do for me too. Writers are also readers, and as a literary community, can’t we all help to boost each other’s books? We can certainly try.
Leilanie Stewart 