The FTC, in all its infinite wisdom and glory, has decided that every blog, large or small, needs to tell you whether or not it gets payola for stated opinions like book reviews. So here it is:
Some of the books reviewed here might be books we received for free as Advance Reader Copies (ARC's). Publishers sometimes send those out to bookstores so that booksellers will read them, like them, and recommend them to customers. A Guide To the Birds of East Africa was just such a book. Katie got it when she still worked at B&N and felt it was the best book she read all last year. She would have felt that way even if she'd paid for it. Sadly, most of the ARC's she read sucked it hard. But that one was awesome. The rest of the books reviewed here will have been purchased with hard-earned cash. Cash we earned at actual jobs, not here for writing about books.
No matter how a book was acquired, the opinions expressed in this blog are the honest opinions of the reviewer. We are all strong women who hate bad writing and crappy books, in no small part because we write ourselves. Since this is a tiny little review site, it's pretty hilarious to think anyone would bother paying us to write anything, especially since it's not like we're called Literary Squee. We're called Literary Snark for a reason, which is mostly to save you from having to read bad books, but also to call out the publishing industry on some of the junk it prints. By our very nature, we don't tend to say nice things about the books discussed here, but you can bet that if we ever do, we were not paid to say it.
If the day ever comes when publishers actually start sending us books to read, we'll let you know, but frankly, the coming of said day would probably cause us to keel over in shock. We'd be happy to have free books though, so if any of you are publishers, please, feel free to send those ARC's this way. (Katie especially loves teen fiction, fantasy & science fiction and chicklit.) We promise to be absolutely fair in our reading, and if we like it, we'll say so.
So there, FTC. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
(Disclaimer to the Disclaimer: No one here advocates smoking. Smoking is bad. It was just an expression.)
