Support The Site
(Or - why I am not cooperating with PR agencies as other bloggers do)
I first started this website at the end of 2010 as an ongoing writing exercise. After not being able to write for more than a decade, I decided to fight my writer’s block by writing book reviews. Since opening this blog, I’ve managed to make a career change and have started to make a living from writing and managing websites; I’ve written book reviews and columns for Walla! (one of Israel’s top 10 websites), published a few articles in Mako (Israel’s top 15) under the name Uri Liest (don’t ask), wrote two blogs about cellular apps for partner telecom and more.
But Writer’s Block(g) was and is my home.
Throughout the years I have been contacted by many young (and some less young) authors, publishing houses and PR agencies that have offered to send me books for review. Except for one time, I have turned down all the offers. Call me a naïve idealist, but I don’t think that you can stay fully objective when someone sends you a book. Yes, when I wrote for Walla! I was delivered packs of books, but my sole obligation was to the website, to my editor, and to the readers. The moment you remove the middleman, and the books come straight from the publishing house or the author, or even worse – the public relations agency, you are being psychologically pressured to write a good review, or at least a less lethal one.
Yes, I sometimes get nooks delivered from publication houses, but as ones that have been in this business for more than a couple of years, they (usually) aware to the possibility that the review wouldn’t be very good, to say the least.
Throughout the years the website developed into much more than a blog, and it now includes a private-held bookstores index (only local Israeli ones, but who knows what tomorrow brings), magazine articles and the horrible book club – a collection of terrible books that I curated (and lately took off the site – at least for a now).
The problem? Books cost money. So does the maintenance of the site, and let’s not even start with the amount of coffee needed to maintain the writer of these lines.
So what do I want from you? Nothing. Really, nothing. I mean, if you want to support the blog it would be awesome. If you don’t want to or can’t, it would still be awesome, as long as you come back and read, because that’s what it is here for in the first place. For you to read.
So why should you support it? Think of it like tipping the bartender who just told you what he thought of a certain book. You can also choose how much to donate, starting at 1$ a month (believe me, that’s more than enough) or as a one-time donation for any amount you decide. The site is not exclusively for paying viewers, but bit supporters will get announcements on new posts and other news, and as you could see if you hit this link, you could eventually even have some influence on the site.