by Christine Raneri

Have you ever been on the road where you are driving along happily singing away to your favorite song when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you hit a wall of white with nowhere to go and not knowing quite what to do?

It happened to me not behind the wheel of my car but rather behind the keyboard of my computer.

It is subzero in the land of review requests with gusts of no-thank-yous approaching 20 inbox per hour.

I thought November and December were causing frost bite on the fingers of bloggers who kindly request review copies but it doesn’t even touch the cool responses and white out conditions seen in January and early February.

I decided to put on my balaclava and locate my ice axe and investigate this frozen blogtundra.   This is what I dug up from some lovely bloggers who shared this cold spell with me.

Book bloggers are a great community of people who not only love books, and reading as much as they can, but who also genuinely love to support authors.

This is a slippery slope because these bloggers receive handfuls of review requests PER week!  I’m sure that’s equivalent to snow falling at 4 inches per hour.  As soon as you shovel the driveway, you look where you started and it’s covered again.

Our lovely bloggers accept some, not all requests on books they are interested in reading and have every intention of reviewing it within the usual 3-5 month window but life happens.  Like all of us, they have actual lives beyond their blog.  They have kids, partners, pets, jobs, errands, illness, simply bad days, weeks, other hobbies and interests, etc….

 Some might not understand that bloggers do this voluntarily!

In comes November and December.  This is the time bloggers hope to have their TBR piles read and completed so the new year starts with a clean slate.  They tend to stop taking review requests so they can put their energy and efforts into the authors who are patiently waiting for a review.

Then the holidays blanket us in chaos and before we know what it, we can’t believe we’re dating our documents with a new year.  What does all this culminate down to?

Bloggers do this voluntarily!

Bloggers are still catching up on their reading, while settling back into the after holiday routines and next thing you know, we’re into February.  Although I have not seen a warming trend outside, I have seen one in the last couple weeks in the blogosphere.  Maybe Valentine’s day had something to do with warming hearts towards authors and books or maybe it’s just the ebb and flow of the blogging industry.

I’m not only a lover of books and ice climbing, I’m a geek through and through so this will be a start to a longitudinal study.  I currently have brain freeze so please feel free to share title ideas for this study.