Within my super-minute slice of virtual goodness (3,000 visitors per month on a good month), sometimes I come across people who want to send me their books for review. When I first started this place earlier this year it never, ever occurred to me that this would happen. I'm not Time magazine, why on earth would anyone want to send me anything? But some time in May I got my first offer and I gracefully accepted it with a well-meaning, if exceedingly lame, disclaimer:
I want to be free to write about whatever I want to write on my site. I am so thrilled that you want to send me your book but... I may never write about it. If this is ok, do send on.
A few months down the line and I am sitting here wondering what on earth I was thinking. It seemed ok at the time, now it reads like, 'You may suck, but I'll take the freebie anyway'. The problem with me dear reader is that I love to put my money where my mouth is and I like to do so unaided. Do you know any of those people who change the world by blabbing about the earthquake in Haiti in Starbucks, pulling long, suffering faces and then snap their necks in the opposite direction when the Big Issue guy waves at them in the street? Well, I am the exact opposite. You won't hear me pontificate about shit, because I love stealth operations.
What I can tell you, however, is that when I talk about books, or when I send off my Proust-esque questionnaire to people I've sieved from my online posse, I always buy their books and only talk about them if I like them (both the book and the person, as it happens). When I recently bought something I wanted to review, at a paltry £6, I felt moved to send a tenner to the author because royalties on that, dear reader, are going to be 60p if he's lucky and, blimey, I mindlessly drop more than that in the Dogs for the Blind tub.
I fancy myself as a bit of a patron of artists, a female, skinter, better-looking version of Lorenzo il Magnifico. I imagine that the people I am writing about on here will one day become mega-super-stars of the literary world and that the words that we exchanged in the early days will forever bear witness to an ideological exchange, however small its scale, in an age that is becoming marred by mediocrity and vacuity. Moral of the long-winded story: if I want to write about your stuff, I will, no copy in the post required. But! If you're Rizzoli or Bauman... yes please.
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