Contents of blog copyright Book Dragon's Lair 2009-2023
I've been gone a while. I started reading fanfiction to escape and I got sucked in an abyss.

I have no idea if someone else is hosting similar challenges. I just grabbed some of what I have hosted before.

Here's to a happy year of great reading
Jan2023: Not much has changed. Writing a fanfiction now O_o as well as reading but I bought 7 new books in December and hope to get those read soon. Crossing fingers about adding challenges (late!)

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Review-a-Thon - Mini Challenge #5

Monster
Review-a-Thon
Mini Challenge #5

Organizing Upcoming Reviews

Sometimes we don't know what we're reading next, sometimes we do. Either way it's good to be organized, especially if you receive books for review. Kate and I share a bunch of google documents that keep us organized when it comes to upcoming reviews. We have our Blog Calendar, a Review Books spreadsheet, and a Review Guide. And here's what we use them for:

*Blog Calendar: Keeping track of upcoming blog tours, features, interviews and other blog events.

*Review Books spreadsheet: A list of review books by month and whether we both have a copy, if they're e-books, and when they are due for publication.

*Review Guide: We use this each month to decide which books we want to try to get reviewed (mostly that are pubbed that month) and if we've read them, whether we both are going to read them and do a double review, etc.

Today, your mini-challenge is to work on organizing your upcoming reviews of books you haven't read. Create an organizer... update... reorganize. The choice is yours. We'd like to see what you do to organize and how you think you'd improve it. Kate and I will be working on updating our documents to coincide with what our future plans on reviewing-wise..

I used to be organized. I had a 3-ring binder and every review book had it's own page. There was an excel spreadsheet with challenges each book would work for as well as important dates and the order the books arrived.

It's all traveled in a handbasket. My organization right now consists of:
1. the wall of shame on my blog
2. a spiral notebook with books listed by pre-2011 then month
3. a shelf where all the print books go.
4. ebooks have a folder on my hard drive
5. a student planner to keep track of blog posts and important dates



I do have a "plan" for next year which I'm going to work on once I get a couple of specific books read/reviewed.
1. something for fun or for a challenge
2. a review book that needs to be re-read then reviewed
3. a book from 2011
4. a book from before 2011
5. a book from 2012.
repeat


I do not believe this plan will last into the new year before it is changed. I really want to be more specific but I'm a mood reader. I'm already thinking that if I force myself to read specific books, in a specific order I can read more just for fun. You know I will anyways, there are too many new books coming out and my TBR pile is growing!

....thinking.....

update: I seem to lose papers so I'm going to have to do this electronically.

Every title will have an empty folder. Inside the "MAIN" folder will be more empty folders named with pieces of information, author, format, received, where from. I'd better add a reviewed on & date folder.

Each piece of info will also be a separate folder so that all the ebooks are grouped together, all the print books are grouped together, all the books received that month are grouped together, etc...

Folders:
Title
format (print-ebook, do I want to specify kindle, smashwords...?)
from (agent, LibThing, author)
Tour (if title is for a tour list date to post)
Year/Mon requested
Date received
Date reviewed
author

Can you think of any others?







copyright Book Dragon's Lair 2009-2011

2 comments:

Kristen said...

Maybe the contact email to send off to the pub when finished, or to the author as well so you can easily just cut and paste the email when it's done and link them to your review post. :)

Sounds like your on the way to being very organized.

I know what you mean about mood reading. I know I should focus on review books, but then there's new books coming out in series I love that I want to catch up on as well.

Book Dragon said...

great idea Kristen, thanks.

I'm much farther ahead this year than I was at this time last year both with reviews and challenges. I think I'm not stressing that "this book doesn't count" as much

Disclaimer

In accordance to the FTC guidelines, I must state that I make no monetary gains from my reviews or endorsements here on Book Dragon's Lair. All books I review are either borrowed, purchased by me, given as a gift, won in some kind of contest, or received in exchange for an honest review.