Alms for the poor! Alms for the ex-leper! Alms for the online reviewer!

So the issue of the sustainability of online reviewing has reared its fugly head again. Doesn't surprise me much, actually, since it is a matter near and dear to many online reviewers' hearts - themselves. Kidding...mostly. But there are a few things I suppose could be discussed from these links, particularly the ones to posts by Gabe Chouinard and Pat.

Yes, anything that involves time and effort is going to feel like work, because it is work. It can be spending dozens of hours crafting a beautiful bookcase after watching the New Yankee Workshop on PBS or it can be agreeing to be a Cub Scoutmaster for your son's troop. If you put the time and effort in, there are going to be times that you feel exhausted, tired, and perhaps ready to give it up, depending of course on your level of enthusiasm. Throw in a full-time paying job and chances are you'll feel exhausted even sooner, especially when there's that thought deep down inside you that says, "You're not really being paid for any of this, you know. Why not skip it for a few days and rest?" Very insidious, that voice; been listening to it for the past month and a half, actually.

When it comes to online reviewing, it depends on why the person is doing it in the first place and what he/she has to contribute. While face-to-face, I'm a friendly, pleasant person to be around, I also happen to have a very coldhearted attitude toward the online review issue. As both Gabe and Pat have noted, there have been a proliferation of online review blogs in the past couple of years. Perhaps these people have been driven by the lure of "publicity" that others get or by the promotional copies, perhaps not. There has been a huge increase, although not really in the number of books being discussed at length. After a while, I've come to feel that sometimes it isn't as much of a lively chatter about books, but rather a droning HUUUMMM sound. Rather annoying at times; some of the same ones engaging in it seem to have noticed this as well, based on their self-conscious admissions here and there in the past few months.

Being "original" or having "a good, strong voice" is part of the equation here, something that I think could have been addressed in the linked posts above. Being "original" doesn't mean just discussing things off the beaten path. I could open the door and point out a few dozen people who think they are "off the beaten path" by getting their tramp stamps, piercings, and day-glo hair dyes, for example. No, the hardest part of being "original" (and this dovetails into having the "good, strong voice") is being brutally honest with yourself and forcing yourself to admit that you have weaknesses and "blind spots" when it comes to reviewing and then working on it. For myself, those weaknesses would involve an unevenness in considering how a text might be perceived by others, not really being interested in reading paranormal romances, and perhaps being too forgiving of authors whose wordplay is much stronger than the other components of their stories.

But doing this takes a lot of effort, perhaps too much. So many have started to fall rather silent, I guess. Perhaps it is due, as Gabe postulates, to readers feeling a pressure to review each and every book that they receive from publishers. After all, even though I read much faster than the average person, if I tried to write reviews of each and every one of the 250-300 books I've received/bought this year, I'd be about as brain-damaged in my reviews as Harriet Klausner! Publishers just hope for word of mouth and I'm being equal opportunity by just photographing the weekly book arrivals (and purchases and gifts) and posting those pictures here. No pressure on me, since I don't view this blog as being beholden to any but myself and perhaps to the four mostly-quiet co-authors of this blog (no, they're all still alive...I think).

Having spent the past few paragraphs talking about effort and the damage done, I guess some are expecting me to spend even more time talking about the issue of payment, since that's what Gabe and Pat devoted much of their posts to. Nope. I don't have a really strong opinion on it. From the time I began back in late May 2007 to revive this blog and make near-daily posts on it, I've always conceived of it as a place to practice and to develop my critiques. Right now, I'm getting exactly what I wanted back then, which is lively conversations here, reaction/tangental threads being developed by others elsewheres, all leading into an interesting conversation rather than just the dull roar of I AM YOUR BLOGGER GOD! LISTEN TO MY 90210 COMMANDMENTS! (although I'll admit such a voice can be cool on occasion). As a result, I've been asked a handful of times this year to write freelance, paid reviews elsewhere. It was an honor, although the money really didn't mean much to me (in part because I'm satisfied with the money I get paid for teaching). It was the being asked to contribute something that meant more to me.

So the talk about monetizing blogs or getting genre-specific ads really doesn't mean much to me. Right now, the most important thing about blogging to me is my continued improvement as a critic and the continuation of the greater conversation. Money comes as a result of that, it doesn't generate it.