Today is the first official day of Bloggiesta, which means it's time to post my to-do list! PLEASE link to your to-do list in the comments because I want to know if I'm missing anything! This weekend is going to be awesome-sauce!

Don't know what Bloggiesta is? Click here to learn more!


My Bloggiesta to-do list:

• Write a review policy
• Write a contest policy
• Clean up my labels
• Schedule outstanding reviews (including audiobooks)
• Film and edit new IMM
• Figure out how to make drop-down menus! (Any advice? I've tried and tried to do this before and I just can't figure it out!) DONE! What do you guys think? It's still a little buggy if you're using Internet Explorer. And if you're curious, I followed this tutorial with just a few personalizations.
• Organize my Google Reader into categories
• Clean up my sidebars and move stuff into new pages (did you know you can now have TWENTY pages?! I thought it was still ten!)
• Learn what SEO is/means
• Make my SEO the awesome-est out there
• Catalogue all the books I own (optional: add them to goodreads)
• Transcribe the blogging panel I was on and get it ready to be posted/a series of posts
• Create a template for a new MONTHLY newsletter! Those of you who signed up (you can on the right sidebar) will actually start getting newsletters!
• Make a list of 2012 books I'm interested in by publication month
• Update author inteview page

So? What are YOU doing? Maybe I should be doing it too!

It's time for bloggiesta! If you don't know what that is, head on over here to learn more and here to see what other challenges are out there!

Today I'm challenging you to work on your policies!

Policies are a very important part of book blogging, and I'll admit that my policies right now are not very rigorous/don't exist. So I'll be doing this challenge right along with you. The bottom of this post describes the details of the challenge, including a giveaway! But first let's talk about two different types of policies:

Review Policies

This is the big kahuna. As a book blogger you need to make it very clear what authors/publishers/anyone should expect from your reviews. I've been doing some research, and I've found some questions (both essential and non-essential) that should be answered in a review policy:

Essential Questions to Answer:

• What kind of books do you review? Are you purely YA? Adult? Audiobooks?
• What kind of books do you explicitly NOT review? Self-published? E-books? Paranormal romance?
• How quickly do you promise to read the book? Sometimes we have a backlog, and you don't want to get requests that say REVIEW MY BOOK NOW!! Because you just won't be able to keep up.
• Do you guarantee a review for every book you read? Sometimes you really don't like a book, are you still going to review it? Sometimes you just don't feel like reviewing a book. That needs to be made clear.
• How should people contact you? Be sure to make your e-mail address/physical address VERY CLEARLY VISIBLE. I hate digging for e-mails. I also personally dislike it when people do [at] and [dot]. I use the actual @ and . on my policy currently, and I haven't noticed any increase in spam.

And here are a few questions that you can answer, but I don't feel are a must.

Optional Questions to Answer:

• Will you participate in tours/extra activities without reading the book? I won't. Because what happens if you participate in the tour and then when you eventually do read the book you hate it?
• What are your statistics? Usually if a publisher is reading your policy then they already care enough about you to send you a message, but this could help! I suggest using Google Analytics
• Where do you post reviews? Just on your blog? Or are you on GoodReads? Amazon? B&N?
• Who will you take requests from? Authors? Agents? Publishers? Dealing with each is a very different experience. Which do you prefer?

Contest Policies
Contest policies are a way to cover yourself. If you make yourself very clear, then chances are you'll be able to back yourself up if anyone ever has a complaint about your contests. Always good to have support in your back-pocket. Here are some questions that you could possibly answer in a contest policy:

• Do you have age restrictions? It can be dangerous to let those under 13 (or even 18) win something on your blog because you can’t guarantee parent permission.
• What about location restrictions? I think sometimes it’s best to say “All contests open to US residents only unless otherwise stated”
• What do you claim the right to do as blogger? Eliminate entries/entrants? End contest early? End contest all together?
• Do you collect addresses or e-mails? Consider adding in a privacy policy
• How will you contact the winners? Sometimes I'm bugged when I realize that I was supposed to go check the winners post and contact the blog author. I thought they were going to contact me!
• How long do they have to respond with an address? And what happens if they don’t meet the deadline?

So there you go! Some coolio guidelines (not rules. I'm no expert) on how to create a privacy and contest policy. So what's my challenge to you? I bet you can guess:

Early this morning I posted my review of The Savage Grace, the final book in the Dark Divine trilogy. Now I have TWO sets of the trilogy to give away to two lucky winners! This giveaway is publisher sponsored, and I haven't been told that it's international, so I can only assume that it's for US residents only. Also, I'm using rafflecopter for the first time, and so there are quite a few more entries than I usually do because I'm testing it out. Here's hoping y'all/I like it! Go forth and enter!

P.S. Rafflecopter can only be seen if you come directly to the blog. So get out of those feed readers and head over here!


a Rafflecopter giveaway

Release Date: March 13th, 2012
Genre:  Romance, Paranormal
Publisher: EgmontUSA
Pages: 488
Rating:
Amazon Link*: Click here
Goodreads Page: Click here
Series: The Dark Divine #3 (Review of #1, #2)
Summary (Spoilers, highlight to view):

A troubled soul. An impossible choice. A final battle.

Wrestling with the werewolf curse pulsing deep inside of her, Grace Divine was finally able to find her brother, but it nearly cost her everything.

With her boyfriend, Daniel, stuck in wolf form and Sirhan's death approaching, time is running out for Grace to stop Caleb Kalbi and his gang of demons. If she fails, her family and hometown will perish. Everything rests on Grace's shoulders.

Blurb: A strong heroine. Believable love story. A great ending to a wonderful series.

Review: I've been in love with this series even before I met Bree (who's a Utah author!). It's amazing. The first book had me completely surprised, the second had me screaming for more, and the third totally satisfied me.

Here's what I love about this book: Grace is treated like an equal. In so many paranormal books the girl is treated as an inferior. She isn't allowed into battle because her love interest is too worried about her. No chance of this happening here. Daniel and Grace are 100% equals. If he goes to battle, she's right on his heels and he's glad to have her. I love that! For being werewolves, their relationship sure is healthy.

This book also delves more into religion. What captivated me in Bree's first book and continues to do so here is her ability to deal with religion in a way that is neither offensive nor cheesy. Grace is really trying to develop her relationship with God, but the book never explicitly states what is right and wrong. Neary anyone can read this and relate to Grace regardless of personal religion. That's so rare in a book. Usually those who are religious are so religious that unless you think EXACTLY like they do you can't relate, or they're shown as crazy, evil people. None of that here!

There were a few things in this book that might be considered deus ex machina, but I think Bree handled them very well. She created a lot of problems she had to solve, and some were solved a little easily but still believably. The one regret I have is that I didn't re-read the first two books before reading this one. It took me a while to remember who everyone was, which made it hard for me to enjoy the first few chapters. I'd recommend reading all of these in one fell swoop if I were you. Lots of names and places to remember.

All in all a fabulous end to a fabulous series. It is paranormal romance, which I know many of you are sick of, but it's one of the best PnRs I've had the pleasure of reading. It's got a lot more depth than most and I LOVE it.



*I am an amazon affiliate. If you purchase this book using my link, I will get a tiny fraction of the purchase, which goes toward contests.

I could write a post today, or I could let Emily do it. She posted an AWESOME post on stats and why they don't matter and we shouldn't let them get us down. I'm totally in the same boat. No matter what I do on my blog it never feels "good enough." That's ridiculous! It's my blog! It's as good as I feel it is. I'm trying harder to stress less about stats, and you should too. :) After all, "How dreary to be somebody, how public like a frog."


Coming soon to Squeaky Books: How I felt about The Hunger Games movie, an IMM vlog, survey results, an awesome giveaway, and a kaboodle of audiobook reviews.