Wot I loved today: book bloggers
Perhaps if I’d had a string of so-so reviews, or even downright nasty reviews, I would not love book bloggers as much as I do. If that were the case, I’d probably avoid them in the same way that I avoid spiders and people with smelly armpits. Luckily, I’ve had nothing but love from the book bloggers of the world* and I therefore, quite shamelessly, LOVE THEM. I dedicate this post to them.
It’s not just the nice reviews, of course. What I really love is that book bloggers are as busy as I am with books: reading and writing and supporting and tweeting and researching (and, often, writing books of their own) – and yet, unlike me and the other writers whose books they review, they ain’t getting paid. These are proper book lovers with busy bookshelves and opinions and the ability – not to mention the willingness – to engage their brains in critical analysis. They’re motivated in a way I could only dream of being! Isn’t that cool? All that endeavour, all for a love of a good book?
Best of all is that the bloggers I’ve met so far have just been delightful. So incredibly friendly and nice and relaxed and enthusiastic. These unseen voices turn into smiling faces at launch parties and I come away able to picture and hear that nice person wot loved my book. It’s always a great moment.
US/Canada publication day for my second novel, A Passionate Love Affair with a Total Stranger, with Notting Hill Press, is approaching fast and my first review came in today. It was five stars. Now, this is lovely. But what’s even more lovely is that the lady who read and reviewed the book is someone on the other side of the world, who I will probably never meet, and who leads a life of which I know nothing. But thanks to the internet my book found its way into her hands and she couldn’t put it down. And she wrote a lovely piece online telling the world that.
As I foray into the world of stars and stripes and maple leaves, I’m ‘meeting’ a whole new group of bloggers and I’m rather excited. A whole new world of people whose opinions could either relegate me into nothingness (or at least a deeper nothingness than that which I exist on that side of the pond at present) or help push me up into world domination.** A whole group of people who, like me, are lost unless they’ve got a cracking book in their hands. Only unlike me they’re bloody brilliant at telling the world about it.
So, bloggers, thank you. Thank you for bothering to read my books – everyone’s books, in fact – and for supporting us, loving us, hating us, being indifferent to us – but above all, for loving books as much as we do. You rule.
Lucy Robinson x
*Apart from one, who apparently wrote a scathing review of me or my work – I don’t know which, as I was on my back with ME when it was written, so I never saw it – but who then tried to befriend me online. This so incensed her blogging contemporaries that I started getting anonymous emails alerting me to her hypocrisy! It was a proper drama with rageful tweets and everything! I was a human controversy!
**It’s OK. I’m just messing.
