Blog Tour: The Anne of Green Gables Collection

Anne of Green Gables Collection

Cover links to Amazon

by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Doma Publishing presents to you The Anne of Green Gables Collection, which has been designed and formatted specifically for your Amazon Kindle. Unlike other e-book editions, the text and chapters are perfectly set up to match the layout and feel of a physical copy, rather than being haphazardly thrown together for a quick release.

This edition also comes with a linked Table of Contents for both the list of included books and their respective chapters. Navigation couldn’t be easier.

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The Lure of Paid Reviewing

Money

Money rules the world, whether you like it or not.  You need money to survive and you definitely need it to live a comfortable life in 99.9% of the world.  That’s pretty much an acknowledged fact.  In order to get money and by extension survive, we sometimes work jobs that we hate because they’re the only ones around.

But what if you could get paid for doing what you love?  What if the thing you love most is reading and writing about reading?  What if you’re an avid reader like me and could get paid for doing what you love the same way writers get paid to do what they love?

Tempting, isn’t it?
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Discussion: Happy Endings

Since I don’t have as much time as I would like to read anymore, I think every once in a while I’ll take a reviewing break on Sundays and start a discussion post where you guys can engage with myself or even other commenters on a topic.  This weeks’ topic is happy endings.

Victoria Grefer did two posts this week on endings in novels.  The first is: Why authors and readers love their Happily Ever After: and why that’s a good thing.  The second post appealed to me a lot more and it was called: Books, Stories, Legends: Happily Ever After is great. Bittersweet can sometimes be better.  I highly recommend reading both articles for some interesting viewpoints on happy endings.

I personally enjoyed the second article more.  Bittersweet endings are more realistic, I feel, because in life you have to take the bad along with the good.  Good things will happen to you in your lifetime and bad things will also happen to you; that’s guaranteed.  So why should characters in stories get perfectly happy endings where everyone marries their love interest and then ride off into the sunset?  Bittersweet endings where there’s both happiness and a tinge of sadness or a lot of sadness with a bit of happiness really do appeal to me.

But personally, what I really want to see is a sad ending in a mainstream YA novel.  Young Adult novels traditionally have pretty happy endings, but I think teenagers know that complete happiness isn’t a reality.  Escapism is great, but a little more realism would be nice.  And in reality, yes, some people never get their happy ending, so to speak.  Will we ever see a truly tragic ending in a mainstream YA novel?  I honestly don’t know.

The thing I want to discuss this week is: Which do you like more: bittersweet or happy endings?  Why?  Does the overall feel of the novel matter to you when deciding if a happy or bittersweet ending was satisfying?  (i.e. a humorous novel should have a happy ending whereas a play like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which is quite dark all throughout should have a bittersweet ending.)

The Best and Worst of May 2013

Well, I’ve come around full circle.  Last year in May I started my Best and Worst of… series and never thought I’d still be doing it a year later.  But it turns out I like analyzing my stats and hearing your thoughts on them as well.  Therefore, I’ll now be adding years to the series.

Anyway, May was a record-breaking month, surpassing February, March and April in terms of page views in one month.  In the month of May I received 4,627 page views, with 2,508 of those being unique views.  That’s pretty good and I’m hoping it will continue to be a trend.  So what were some of the best posts for this month?  Let’s take a look:

1.  The Hunger Games and Ancient Rome

2.  End of Days by Eric Walters

3.  An Apology to Self-Published Writers

4.  The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

5.  How Fast do you Read?

Amazingly, there’s two articles up here that were just published this month, rather than the same old articles I’ve had up for a year.  I’m proud to say that my apology to self-published writers reached so many people and got such a great response.  I thought long and hard on publishing that article, but decided that doing the right thing was more important than my embarrassment at admitting I was wrong.  The reading speed article did surprisingly well, likely because it really engaged a lot of people.  It was fascinating to see how fast other people, both regular readers and book bloggers read.

Now for the worst articles of May:

1.  Wither by Lauren DeStefano

2.  The Show by John Heldt

3.  Delirium by Lauren Oliver

4.  Run Like Jäger by Karen Bass

5.  Victoria: May Blossom of Britannia by Anna Kirwan

When you think about it, none of these are really surprising.  Some are old books that were never popular to begin with, some are the first books in trilogies that are or almost are finished and one is a self-published book.  The latter, The Show by John Heldt, is a great novel, but it just doesn’t seem to be getting much traffic lately.

Well, that was pretty much how my May went.  How was yours?  Are you reading anything good at the moment?

On Review Requests, Wait Times and Health Problems

First off, let me say that I’m flattered so many authors have been contacting me to request reviews for their books.  Not only is it awesome to get free books, it’s always such a great experience working with authors from all kinds of different backgrounds.  This is truly one of the joys of blogging.

However, I’m starting to get to where I have too many requests for my situation.  I won’t be closing requests, but I will be a lot more picky about whose requests I accept.  Don’t follow the guidelines in my review policy and send me a generic email?  Trash.  It’s that simple, even though in the past I would give most authors a second chance.

Also, waiting times are likely to be quite long, currently sitting at 2-3 months for ebooks and two weeks for paperbacks.  There’s a good reason for all this and it’s not my awful procrastination habit either.

I’ve been driving back and forth making eight hour round trips to see various specialists down in the city.  You see, I’ve been suffering from chronic back pain for almost three years now and my symptoms are getting worse.  The pain in my back is more severe, and I’m starting to get pain in my legs, particularly my knees.  Is my condition life threatening?  Not likely, thank goodness.  But does it keep me from doing what I love?  Sometimes.

So far I’ve been lucky enough not to have to make the tough decision to cut back on blogging.  Blogging is one of the few things left to me now that I come home from work and collapse from exhaustion and pain.  I can’t do all of the physical activities I used to, so in some ways I do get more reading done.  However, I also have days where all I can do is sleep because the pain makes it hard to even hold a book.

Therefore you guys probably won’t be seeing as many interviews or giveaways this summer as I have done in the past, but hopefully once I get my diagnosis and get some proper treatment I can get on with my life.