Faithful visitors to this site will notice that once again there is not a promised new book review posted.
I started a Friday book review series a month ago to clear a roughly 30-book backlog that had accumulated since I promised four years ago to review any book sent to me. When the series began, I promised to review a book a week. That quickly became once every two weeks when I couldn’t read the books quickly enough. Now, it’s been three weeks since my last review and I’m halfway through my latest book.
Suffice it to say, I don’t know when my next book review will be posted. It’s important to me to be a person of my word, and I’m tired of making promises I keep breaking. I don’t know if I need to stretch my book review schedule to once every month or abandon it entirely and post reviews as I finish reading these books, even if it’s one every six months. I’d rather post an infrequent but thorough review than rush up hastily-written screeds about books I’ve only skimmed. That said, I’m also concerned about having no incentive to read these books at a reasonable pace.
I’d welcome feedback on this from anyone who’d like to give it.
Hi Graham,
I would first like to congratulate you on your posts the past couple of months. They have been of great interest to me and you are carving out a role as a baseball history
analyst that is merited. You seem to have been energized and your productivity is impressive.
I suggest, since you ask, that you try to produce a baseball book review every ten weeks. That takes a bit of pressure off of you and still gives you a timeline to use an an incentive to meet your goal.
I would also suggest you back off your promise by saying priority goes to the 30 books you had in your possession when you decided to reevaluate. After you complete the process of reviewing those 30 books you should take a break and make a new promise to your readers if you decide to continue this practice.
Gregg
Gregg, Tom, Marc– thank you for your replies. I’m leaning toward making this a monthly series, though I’m not opposed to posting reviews more frequently if I find myself picking up the reading pace.
No easy alternative here. What has to be met is the expectation of the authors who probably provide the book expecting a fast review and posting before or shortly after book publishing. A book review when the book is already months past initial availability may have limited value.
I’d suggest that you try hard to pick up the pace by viewing your reviews as your own baseball education. Pick only books that do that for you, then once a book is on deck, set goals (pages read) for each day and try hard to meet a 2 week deadline.
Otherwise, I’d suggest an abandon of the project, or just doing the reviews as you can while making authors aware of limited commit.
Easy, don’t post a schedule at all. Anytime you make a hobby a chore by creating schedules, you take some fun out of it, IMO.