Blog Thoughts: Origins

On Tuesday I promised to share some thoughts about the origins of this blog. Behold, those thoughts:

It was actually Harlequin that got me book review blogging. I'd been buying ebooks directly from Harlequin for a while - I'd subscribed to their Blaze line for a bit, and then just started grabbing mass amounts of books whenever there was a deal available. 

As you can imagine, my stack of ebooks was fairly thick. With two young kids, I found myself reading quite a bit - while I was nursing my infant son, while putting him to bed, and generally sneaking in a page or two whenever I could because reading kept me awake when the many sleepless nights made me feel like a zombie.

I felt a little bit guilty about all the reading I was doing, particularly once my husband went back to work. What if, I thought, I started posting reviews of the books I read? Could that in some way justify all the reading? Would it be possible for me to save some money on book purchasing (easily my single biggest fluff expense)?  

At the time I wasn't reading much in the way of book related blogs: mainly because any time I read about a book, I wanted to buy it. You can see why this would be a problem, right? While I didn't know a whole lot about blogging book reviews, I did know how to string together coherent sentences, and I read a lot. I figured that was enough to get started!

I quickly discovered Harlequin did provide review copies - via Netgalley which I joined for free. Just as quickly, I discovered that Harlequin had relatively high standards for handing out e-ARCs. Fortunately, there were other publishers and authors who were willing to take a risk on me and my blog, and very quickly I had enough review copies of books to keep me very, very busy.

I have yet to be approved by Harlequin via Netgalley, which no longer seems like a big deal to me. It'd be lovely to amass enough followers that they'd send me a couple copies now and again, but I've discovered so many other wonderful publishers out there that I'm more than content. As it stands, I have reviewed two books published via Harlequin - one purchased myself and one via book tour. So I guess I can put half a tick mark in that box on my to do list!  ;)

Now I'm more motivated by my desire to discover new authors and new publishers, as well as wanting to improve how I blog and write reviews.

Next week I'm going to talk about what I've learned in the last year about blogging and I'm going to discuss reviews and spitball some thoughts about different format for reviews!

Help me celebrate a full year of book review blogging by entering my giveaway!

If you blog, what got you started? Is that still your motivation?