This month, I’m delighted to bring you an interview with Suze and Anniek who are the team behind the With Love For Books blog.

Hi Suze and Anniek, welcome to the RNA blog. You run a blog together as a joint venture. How did you meet, and what prompted you to start a blog together?
Suze replied to Anniek’s penpal ad on an online friendship forum when we were both nineteen years old. We had a special click immediately and also had a lot in common. We just moved out of our parental homes, we loved reading books, we liked talking about computer games and we were both into writing incredibly long letters. Soon after we started writing we decided to meet and we both instantly knew we’d found a friend for life. After eighteen years we stopped writing letters on a regular basis, but we still send each other mail and of course we spend as much time together as we can.

Our blogging journey started gradually. Suze had a general interest blog and reviewed all kinds of items. She tried to review a book per day during that time. Anniek instantly loved the book reviews and Suze asked her if she wanted to write her own. Anniek started to submit regular reviews and Suze gradually increased the number of hours she spent on reading books. When the blog became too much for Suze to run on her own Anniek offered to help. We started to brainstorm and decided to equally share a space and only write about what we love the most, books. that is when we came up with the name With Love for Books together. After four years of reviewing we still love it just as much as in the beginning.

You often run giveaways on your blog. Can you tell us a bit about that?
We offer authors the chance to run giveaways on our blog. We have a lot of experience with rafflecopters and how to get authors as many followers as possible. We ask for social media details, so the authors can decide which sites to add. The duration of the giveaway depends on the value of the prize, varying from a week to a month. We regularly promote the books on social media in exchange for the giveaway, this way the book gets a lot of exposure. We also encourage others to share the covers as entries to give the authors as much chance as possible to have their book shown on social media. Authors can fill out a small form that they can find in our review policy if they want us to post a review and giveaway, but they can also contact us on social media with their email address, so we can send them a message with instructions.
The giveaways have hundreds of participants, sometimes even more. There are various reasons why authors ask us to add a giveaway to our post. For some authors it’s about the followers, for others it’s about letting someone with experience run their giveaways, so they know they will get a lot of entries, for some it’s about making someone’s day with their book or a signed item and for others it’s about as much exposure of their book as possible.

Tell us a bit about your review policy – what genres do you each review? Could you give us a link to your review guidelines?
Suze reviews anything with a good story. She reads almost every genre and likes every romantic subgenre. As long as the story is romantic she’s happy. Anniek likes paranormal romance, historical romance and contemporary romance. When we receive a request we carefully research the book and author. We only write positive reviews and leave five star reviews for each book we feature. That means we need to be sure about every book we accept. We know what we like and are really good at making that selection. If we accept a review book it hardly ever happens that we end up not liking it enough to review. For some it might sound scary that we only review when we love a story, but there’s nothing to worry about in that area, we know ourselves and our audience well. We are completely author focused, that means we accept books from any publisher and self-published books are welcome too.

You can find review guidelines for With Love For Books here.

Do you meet up with other bloggers and reviewers?
Not regularly, but sometimes. It depends on distance, time and opportunity. We love talking about books and are both pretty chatty and outgoing. We like meeting others who feel the same way.

You do author interviews on your blog. What do you like to see in a good guest interview?
We make sure we have a good impression of the story before we ask the questions. This means we often read the whole book before we send our interviews. Our aim is to ask questions that relate to the book and we always research the author and ask something about the information they have available online. This way our readers get to know both the author behind the story and the story itself. When a Q&A is part of an event we come up with questions that suit the theme. All other interviews are based on research we’ve done before sending our questions. This way we hope authors enjoy participating, which shows
in the interview.

Do you ever read just for fun or do you review every book you read?
We do read for fun, but usually we end up reviewing those books too. We review our own books as well as review copies, not having a review copy is never a reason not to read a book when it’s high on our wish list.

We often ask people in the book world what they consider to be the next ‘big thing’ – what do you hope to see more of in 2018?
We’ve read a lot of books about hopes and dreams lately. Wishes are being fulfilled and characters are brave enough to chase after what they want. It’s a fabulous theme and very suitable for writers whose stories revolve around true love. What we hope to see more of is regency romance, we really enjoy stories about handsome dukes, fabulous viscounts and moody Scottish lairds and like dreaming about glamorous balls and beautiful dresses. Humour in books is another big love, a good funny story brightens up anyone’s day and that perfectly suits our With Love for Books positivity theme.

Thank you so much for coming to hang out with us Suze and Anniek. I hope your blog goes from strength to strength.

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You can find out more about With Love For Books by visiting their site:

Website

Twitter:

Suze 

Anniek

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Rhoda Baxter writes feel good stories about strong women and nice guy heroes. She especially likes it when they make her laugh. You can find out more about her award nominated books and mentoring services on www.rhodabaxter.com