Why Do I Write So Many Book Reviews???

I've always been a reader. Books are pretty much the first things I can remember about my life. Dr. Seuss was a big deal. I remember the ABC Book. It was white. The A was red, the B was green and the C was blue. There were three strange creatures playing around the letters, and I loved that book. Big A, little A, what begins with a? Aunt Annie's alligator. A … a … A. Perhaps my favorite was Big M, little M … Many mumbling mice are making midnight music in the moonlight ... mighty nice.

It wasn't just the ABC Book. My childhood library was filled with Dr. Seuss, including Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, and the crazy tongue twister that is Fox in Socks. One of my most beloved childhood books was The Monster at the End of This Book. Grover. Who doesn't love Grover?

I was an only child for some time. I remember being read to, but I also had to entertain myself a lot. One of the things I liked doing was pulling out my clunky hard plastic turntable—the cover was a boring beige color—and sifting through my collection of Disney Read-Alongs. 

"This is a Disneyland original Little Long-Playing Record, and I am your story reader. I am going to begin now to read the story of [insert title here]. You can read along with me in your book. You will know it's time to turn the page when Tinker Bell rings her little bells like this: (sound of 'chimes' ringing). Let's begin now."

I remember having Cinderella, Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, Pete's Dragon, and my favorite, Alice in Wonderland. I had such a love affair with this story that I wanted an Alice themed cake for my fifth birthday.

Then I went to school and was introduced to the Bookmobile and the Scholastic Book Fair. Oh, my goodness, the Bookmobile. This was a really big deal for my little book loving heart. My mom would tuck a ten-dollar bill in my pocket, and when I stepped inside that big bus, I was in heaven. I would study all the photos of all the books and stickers coloring the newsprint sheets that were handed out in school from Scholastic. I remember getting those every few months, and I would take my money into my teacher and couldn't wait for her to pull out the great big box weeks later and hand out all the goodies my classmates and I ordered.

Books. Seriously. Is there anything better than books?

I read a lot, but I also wrote. In middle school, I began writing short stories and poetry. I asked for a typewriter one Christmas. You could buy little plastic discs that gave you different fonts. I had the standard type font, but I could switch it to italics. That was cool, but you could also buy typewriter ribbon in different colors.

What? I could type poetry in blue italics! My life was complete! 

Then I wrote my first book. Before I'd even finished it, it was well over 600 pages. I began trying to shop it around to publishing houses. This was in the late 90s, and I didn't have tools at my disposal like the internet. I spent hours sitting in the library scribbling down names and addresses of houses that might be interested in my very long family drama. Because the books that had this information in them were in the research section, I was not allowed to check them out. This is what we call determination.

I wrote so many query letters, and many houses requested I send ten pages, a chapter, the first three chapters. And so, I printed what was requested, and I spent money in postage to send it to them. I got a lot of responses back. No one wanted to publish the book, but one literary agent who read it gave me a lot of very helpful feedback. To this day, I'm grateful for what he wrote to me. (Mark Sullivan, you are awesome. Thank you!) I had a stack of rejection letters and to be honest, it took the wind out of my sails. I didn't finish the book. I wound up putting the project to the side after my husband and I had our first child. And then we had child number two. We'd always planned to homeschool, so I jumped into that with both feet. I made myself a promise that I would finish the book someday, and even if it never got published, at least I could say I completed it. I could say I wrote a book.

The list of authors I enjoyed reading was long. In my freshman year of high school, an English teacher I absolutely loved had us read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I was blown away by this book. I loved it so much that for a long time, I reread it yearly. Then, when life happened, and things got rough, I would pull it out again, and reading it consoled me. It's still my favorite book of all time. I also loved reading books written by Dean Koontz. (How many of you read Watchers?) I've never really been a fan of horror novels, but there were a lot of Stephen King books that I loved, too. (Delores Claiborne for example.) I loved mysteries and thrillers and read the Inspector Lynley series by Elizabeth George, the Kay Scarpetta books by Patricia Cornwell, the goofy Stephanie Plum books written by Janet Evanovich, and the magic realism of Sarah Addison Allen's books. James Lee Burke. Wow. I absolutely love the way James Lee Burke writes, and Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson & the Olympians series. I was reading V.C. Andrews at thirteen—yikes, but I certainly wasn't the only tween reading those books—and then there was Judy Blume. Thank God for Judy Blume. There's so many. I'll stop here, but I could keep going. Like I said before, there's nothing better than books. 

When I took on the gigantic responsibility of educating two children, I continued to read, but it was instructive books that sat on my nightstand instead of the latest Michael Crichton. I learned how to build a curriculum that suited the county we happened to live in at the time, and I even took a job with a small publication called Kids 411. I became a homeschool liaison, writing articles and sharing with other parents all the information I had gathered about being a homeschool family. (This was in 2003, and Colorado was not a big homeschool state at that time. Maya had a lot of friends she danced and did gymnastics with, and none of them were homeschooled. I was largely on my own, and I was okay with that. I was good at homeschooling. I absolutely loved being a homeschool mom.)

For many years, the authors I read came from a very different list. Sandra Boynton, Eric Carle, Audrey Wood and Laura Joffe Numeroff. I read Mary Pope Osborne, Marcus Pfister, E.B. White, C.S. Lewis and Jane Yolen. I read Room on the Broom, Sheep in a Jeep, The Mermaid's Baby, Goodnight Moon and Chrysanthemum. The kids and I would go to the library at least twice a week. They didn't have a cap on how many books could be checked out, and neither did I. I read at least four books to them at bedtime every single night. We took books with us everywhere we went just in case there was time during errands or long car rides when they got bored. I read a whole lot of books from the back seat of many cars. Children's books. They are magical.

When our oldest was about twelve, I finally finished writing that first novel. (The finished version was nowhere near 600 pages by the way.) This time, I didn't try to sell it, I published it on my own. I went through a publisher called Xlibris. They taught me a lot, but they charged a great deal of money to do so. If I had to do it over again, I would not have gone this route, but it did make it possible for me to decide to publish and then be published. That was at the end of 2012. I learned a lot that next year about the ins and outs of having a book on the market. This was when I found out how important the almighty review is.

Let me blunt. Reviews are everything. Every author needs them, and they are so very difficult to get. Sites like Amazon advertise books with a lot of reviews, and literary agents and publishing houses look at the number of reviews to gauge how popular—and how financially profitable—a certain title might become. I repeat: REVIEWS ARE EVERYTHING.

As a new author, I had no reviews. I did know how to research, though, and I found a review group on Goodreads. It turned out to be a great group. Books were grouped according to genre, and each reviewing period lasted about two months. In order to get four reviews, you had to be willing to read four books and write and post four reviews. None of the reviews were reciprocal, so I was never asked to review a book by an author who had written a review for me. There was never any crossover. They were honest reviews. (I did this for my first two books, and some of the reviews I received were awful—but they were helpful. I'd rather have an honest review and be able to learn from it than to be told a book is fantastic when it isn't.) I was part of this group for about two years, and I met a lot of great authors. I also got to read many amazing—and some not so amazing—books. I'm not in the group any longer, but it still exists thirteen years after I first discovered it.

There are a lot of authors publishing books. Some of them are traditionally published. Some of them are attached to smaller publishing houses, and some of them—like mine—are published by indie authors. The one thing every single one of these books has in common is that they all need reviews. 

I decided that if I was going to ask for reviews, I was going to write reviews.

One of the reviews I wrote that garnered the most attention was for Blow Fly by Patricia Cornwell. I never write a review hoping someone will comment on it. In fact, at the time, I didn't realize that was a thing, so the response it got took me by surprise. This book is number twelve in the Kay Scarpetta series. I had been an avid reader of this series, until I got to the twelfth book. She chose to do something with her characters that didn't sit well with me, and I was hesitant to read further. I felt guilty about this. I'd been loyal to this writer and this series, but I was struggling with it all. I decided to look at some of the reviews about this book to see what other readers were saying about it—and I was horrified by some of the things I saw.

People, specifically when they have any amount of anonymity, can be incredibly mean and rude. That's not something I believe in. I don't write mean reviews. Does this mean I give four and five stars to every book I read? Absolutely not. Does this mean there haven't been books I chose to skim quickly instead of actually reading because I found no interest in them? Nope. I won't say I thought a book was good if I didn't think it was. But I always find something I liked about a book—perhaps the author's humor, maybe a phrase or two stood out, maybe it was a character, or the premise of the story—it could be something really small, and I'll be sure to write about it. I'll say the book didn't work for me, but that I'm sure there are others who will feel differently. You can say you didn't care for something without being a jerk about it. There were a lot of people being jerks about Blow Fly.

I revisited the Kay Scarpetta series. I reread all the books, including book twelve. I'll be honest—it still hit me the same way it did the first time I read it. I sat and put my thoughts and feelings down—not just about the book, but about the other reviews it had received. I think it would be really amazing if Patricia Cornwell stumbled across my review one day. I'd love to know what she thought of it. 

I write reviews because authors need reviews. I write reviews because I, as an author, desperately need reviews. One of the cool things about it is, by sitting down and putting your ideas about a book into a single sentence or several paragraphs, you're challenging your brain to write in a different way. It's not storytelling. It's a different kind of practice. The more you write, the better you become at it. Writing reviews is a great tool for an author.

You don't have to do anything special to leave a review for an author. You read a book, you jot a few ideas about what you liked and what you didn't about the book. You may not hear a thank you, but I can guarantee that author will be grateful. Authors oftentimes pay companies to help them find people who will read their books and leave reviews. I do. I go through Booksprout. I pay a fee every year to have books listed on that site, and I offer them to readers free of charge in return for honest reviews. It doesn't cost a reader anything to have an account with Booksprout. They get free books, the author gets reviews. It's a win/win. 

There are other companies that do this as well. At the beginning of 2026, I decided I was going to start reading for NetGalley. I look for specific authors, and a lot of my favorites use NetGalley. One of the things I've come to enjoy most about reading for them, though, is finding authors that are new to me, or authors who have just written their first book. It's so cool to stumble across so many brilliant novels that I otherwise would have never found. An author I know decided to use BookSirens to help her get reviews a couple of months ago. I joined to support her, but once I was a member, I just decided to keep reading for other authors on the site. I couldn't possibly name all the companies who offer books for reviews, but I know it wouldn't take much research for anyone to find them.

Honestly, logging into NetGalley or BookSirens today gives me a similar feeling to stepping up into the Bookmobile or looking through the flyers from Scholastic back in elementary school. Do you know how many books there are just waiting to be read??? It's almost more than I can fathom. 

I read on average about three to four books a month, and I review every one of them. When I brought this blog back to life, I decided I would use it to help get the word out on the books I've been able to review. I post them on my Facebook page, as well as on Instagram. Readers are everywhere. Perhaps this post will urge one or two of them to go and find one of my books and leave a review for me. :)