Meet the Bloggers: Arctic Books

Meet the Bloggers is a feature on The Hardcover Lover that features guest bloggers from all over the world. Each month, a different blogger will be featured here with a bookish guest post. You'll find many different types of posts on Meet the Bloggers. There can be guest reviews, advice, and just bookish topics. I think it's an exciting way for readers to discover new bloggers.

Are you ready? Let's meet today's featured blogger!

Meet Ali

Ali from Arctic Books is here today to share a post that many of us book bloggers will be able to relate to. She'll be discussing the pros and cons of only reading and reviewing ARCs and new releases on book blogs.

Hi, everyone! First of all, I want to thank Erin for giving me the opportunity to write a guest post on her lovely blog! Thank you, Erin! 

Today, I’m super excited to share with you my post, which is about the pros and cons of just reading/reviewing ARCs and new releases. I thought this would be interesting, because, hey, that’s what I’m currently doing anyway. I love making lists, so I’ll be primarily listing out the pros and cons. Let’s get started! 

Pros:

• Always super exciting in general; you can’t go wrong with new books.  
• Pre-order incentives; sometimes you can get pretty swag from pre-ordering new releases and you really can’t get cool swag from buying backlist books. 
• New additions to your bookshelf; I don’t know about you, but I adore touching and stroking the covers of my new books. And reading them, of course.  
• Taking pictures of new books; if you’re a bookstagrammer or just like taking pictures of your books, do you ever get tired of taking pictures of the same books all the time? Well, now you get these new books to read/take pictures of!  
• We all know our favorite all-time, auto-buy authors. But sometimes, we have to wait a year or two for their next book to come out, so what better to do than to pick up that pretty new ARC or new release and maybe discover another favorite author.  
• Say you have the ARC of a very anticipated release. Now you get to read it first, which is always nice. 

Image

Of course, there’s a lot of pros to reading primarily ARCs and new releases. But if there’s an up, there’s a down. Here are some cons that I’ve noticed: 

Cons:

• Yes, the pre-ordering is fun, but your wallet may not think so. 
• Where’s the love for backlist books? I don’t know about you, but I have at least 100+ backlist books that I want to read, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to get to it. (That’s also why I’m a huge fan for reading challenges focused primarily on backlist books!) 
• If you’re a reviewer, sometimes life gets in the way and you can’t read all of those new releases/ARCs that you wanted to get to. 
• You know those couple of books everyone always talks about but you haven’t read yet? For me, it’s the Grisha trilogy, Throne of Glass, The Darkest Minds, etc. Since I haven’t read those yet and I’m mainly reading new releases and ARCs, I don’t really understand the references to other backlist books. Not to mention the spoilers that you may encounter.  
• If you only read ARCs, well, you get the ARC copy, which is an uncorrected proof. That means that there’s going to be mistakes/slight changes from the ARC to the finished copy, which may be irritating. 

Image

Do you read mostly ARCs/new releases or backlist books? Maybe a mix of both? What pros and cons do you see for reading primarily ARCs and new releases?

About Ali: Hi! I'm Ali, a book blogger + avid reader + feminist. I love chocolate, 30-minute sitcoms, and the Oxford comma. You can find me all over (most) social media! Twitter | Instagram | Blog