A look at the year past, a look at the future year

With 2017 drawing to a close, it's time to look back on the blog in 2017.

In 2017, I had set myself a couple of goals, and both were achieved, I'm proud to say:

1. That at least a third of the reviews would be about books written by PoC writers. That goal was actually quite easy to achieve, even if I've sometimes had to search for books published more than three years ago. To say it was easy to achieve doesn't mean at all that there is a plethora of books written by PoC and traditionnally published out there. No, there isn't. But it was a pleasure to get out of my comfort zone, one name led to another, and anyway, when you publish only about 30 reviews per year, it isn't that hard to find about a dozen written by PoC writers.
2. That I would get some decent statistics. Well, the built-in statistics system and the Google statistics don't agree at all about how many people visit the blog (one is over-enthusiastic, the other don't even register me when I'm on it - but it's on purpose, I'm paranoid), but I have what I estimate to be sufficient statistics to keep me blogging and not feeling I natter on alone in the dark!

One of my initial goals was also to review two books a month. I suddenly changed gears barely a few weeks into 2017 by publishing three reviews a month. It seems to me like a good balance between my free time to write reviews and what a (very!) hypothetical reader faithfully following my recommendations would read within a month.

I'm pretty happy about all the books I've reviewed. Looking back, yes, there are one or two that I wonder why I actually ended up reviewing them because a few months later I can say that I'm not as enthusiastic about them as I was when reading them. But for the vast majority, I stand by every single word I wrote.
I'm also quite happy about the variety and diversity I've achieved through the reviews.
You can check below the complete publication schedule with the details, including gender, race, nationality of writers ; genres ; small press / big press ; gender of the characters, etc. So if you enjoy doing statistics, be my guest! I'm pretty proud that I covered writers from almost every continent. I was also quite surprised - not - when I realised that most of the female main characters in the books I read were written by female writers.
Please note: the disparity between male and female writers is because I reviewed an uneven number of novels. But parity remains when you look at the reviews since the opening of the blog and will continue in 2018 when the first novel reviewed will be written by a female writer.

What about 2018?

1. As always, I'll follow a strict alternance between reviews by books written by a woman and books written by a man.
2. I'll keep on reviewing PoC writers and they will represent again at least a third of the yearly total.
3. I want to go back to oldies, so I'll review 6 or 5 books published before I was born or the year I was born. I had to choose a date and 1978 felt as good as any date. And now, it's old, anyway!
   
4. I'll keep on reviewing three books a month and still selecting those I preferred.
5. As it was the case in 2017, only five books or less will be review copies or arcs.
6. Jeannette Ng very kindly agreed to do a spoiler interview with me (here) and I thought it was very interesting, especially considering a lot of people read books reviews after having read the book. I'd like to do more of those with writers whose book have left my mind reeling. But as it doesn't really depend on me, we'll have to see.

I still won't apply any quota to QUILTBAG writers as it proves tricky since not all writers announce to the world if they are QUILTBAG and I certainly won't go to pester them to know about it.

I hope you enjoyed the reviews in 2017 and that you will enjoy those to come in 2018. Thanks to every single one of you reading and following the blog and spreading the word about it!