For the first three-plus years of this blog, I have done several book reviews, a big chunk of them for Reader’s Favorite.

Since I set up my blog in May 2016, I’ve been constantly receiving messages requesting me to do book reviews—even though the ones I’ve written for my blog have a different objective. Unfortunately or not, I am no longer take on the task of writing book reviews.

You might be asking why I don’t write book reviews—when there are still some books reviewed on my blog—and what were the criteria I used for writing book reviews.

First, let me start with the last question, which will lead to the main point. As an author, I face the same challenge authors do. I have limited time to juggle writing—including children’s story books—promotions, and blogging.

I’m also faced with other challenges, which make me relate dearly to my fellow indie authors— such as finding reviews for my children’s books or having readers give any type of feedback about the reading.

I’m not lying; sometimes I am guilty of not leaving reviews, or at least I used to be before I became a reviewer. Not because I didn’t like the book or product, but because as a consumer, I didn’t realize the big impact we create when we leave a review. Also, life gets in the way of things. We get caught up on different projects, and it is easy to lose track of something that seems so “meaningless.”

With that in mind, reviewing books on my website became a daunting process to me because of the high demand, shortage of time, and availability. I’m the one who reviewed and gave a personal account of the books I read, and the services or products I tried. I didn’t outsource this task to anybody, and that was never my goal.

For a while,  I’m used a strict process to choose the books I featured on my blog. This selective process has nothing to do with book promotions because this was never the main idea of Reviews by The Banks anyway. Instead, it had to do with the category and the message behind them.

At some point, I was featuring only children’s books that conveyed a strong message, preferably one that was related to or brought awareness to a big cause.

One good example was my last post about the book My Belly Has Two Buttons, which discusses the tale of children with pediatric feeding disorders. Other examples are the autism cause, pediatric cancer, children’s literacy, bullying, and so forth.

Now I no longer write book reviews.

Other than that, I will be happy to point out some alternatives for reviewers in an upcoming post. Not only that, but I will point out the do’s and don’ts to heed when reaching out to a reviewer.