Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Review Policy and Rating System

Interested in having Layers of Thought do a review for a book or more?

All review requests are welcome and greatly appreciated. We also do book tours, author guest posts, interviews, and love giveaways. (Please note that we will occasionally review music, movies, and other products.)

Please email Shellie with your request. Thanks!

All submissions will receive a “preview” between a few days to up to three weeks of receipt. A “review” will be posted after the book has been read. All live post links will be forwarded to the requesting party. Each preview and review combo includes a synopsis, author information, and pictures of the book and author when available, links for purchase, as well as our personal thoughts regarding each item. For books which are received from Shelf Awareness, Net Galley, or Unknown - they may be included in a “group preview”, and may be reviewed out of order.

All items received will be previewed, read, and reviewed in the order they are received unless requests are made from the submitter. In general - if an item is not finished it will not be reviewed, and designated abandoned. We generally try to read and review every book that we receive, and those which are to be published soon are also read and reviewed as close to the publish date as possible.

We try to only accept books that one of us is likely to enjoy so that the review will be favorable. At the publisher's request those which are not of interest can be forwarded to other bloggers who are more likely to enjoy them. We also do not like to post negative reviews and will give the publicist/author/publisher the option to  designate the book as abandoned.

*A note around self published or small press books. We are entirely aware of the man power it takes to create a perfect copy and that larger publishers have this luxury. Taking this in mind, for those books who do not have this access to a large editing and marketing team, we will provide two ratings – one for content, the second for editing.

Types of books that we prefer:

Shellie - My tastes are eclectic. My favorite genre is speculative fiction of most sub genres. Horror, thrillers, and misc novels as well as young adult are also fun. On occasion I also enjoy nonfiction - where my tastes vary from memoirs, to comedy and beyond. I do not read Christian Literature, most Romance, or books about politics which have a specific partisan association connected with it. My Goodread’s account has a very large list of books I am interested in, that I have read, as well as ratings for most genres.

JD/John - General fiction as opposed to non fiction, and speculative fiction specifically science based are his preferences. His dislikes are as Shellie’s. Being a music buff, anything related to that art form is greatly appreciated.

(For further personal and professional information our profiles are linked on each of our names in the above sections.)

Shellie/I do use a nook for reading books, but prefer actual paper copies. John does not have access to a reader so hard copies are needed.

Blog Statistics as of June 11, 2010:

These stats are taken from Google Analytics: Where we currently have 190 Google follower, 220 Goodreads friends, 140 friends on Facebook where the blog feed is also updated, as well as 260 aggregate feed  readers. In addition 290 twitter followers, as well as approximately 30 visitors per day. Commenting varies from post to post and can range from zero to 30. If you have any other specific data which you are interested in let me know.

How We Rate Books:

Although we would prefer to not rate books, for the sake of clarity we use the "Five Star System" which is widely recognized and translates to Goodreads, where Shellie catalogs her (and John’s) books. Reviews are also posted on Goodreads and may be posted on Amazon by request.

Five Star System Key

Five Stars -  This book was Transformational!

Four Stars - Loved it!

Three Stars - Liked it.

Two Stars - It was OK.

One Star - Did not like it and perhaps did not finish it.

No Stars - Could not get through it, and is designated abandoned.

Thank you for taking the time to read our policy. We look forward to your requests and correspondence.

Updated - June 11, 2010

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