A while back now I stopped reviewing books here on the blog.

At the time it wasn’t meant to be a pause but a seamless transition to a second blog, self-hosted, that would carry book reviews and related content. The original idea was to build a more commercial site that would eventually carry advertising and that I could use to play with online marketing techniques* – that way it didn’t matter if I messed up because the property was mine.

I bought the domain (bookrater.co.uk), I installed wordpress, I went trawling for plugins and generally mucked about with the software instead of writing content. In the end I got bored and left it. Only I didn’t carry on reviewing on my original blog, a somewhat stupid move given how useful they are as content when not much is happening.

Anyway, as part of yesterday’s moment of insight I realised that it doesn’t matter if I haven’t designed my own perfect masthead or if my rater plugin doesn’t quite do what I want. All that really matters is the content. And so I wrote my first review in ages, turned on the search engine features and posted that bad boy. Bookrater is live.

I can’t promise it won’t undergo a number of changes over the next few months until I settle on a look I like but I can promise reviews and eventually not just from me. I’m hoping, given time, people will jump on the comments thread and we’ll be able to get a discussion going, but even if that doesn’t happen at least I’ll have a nice record of my reading. As it reflects my interests by follow on it won’t just include genre books, or even just fiction, in fact the first review is of a biography.

Anyway, take a look and keep checking back over the coming days. I’ll let you know when new reviews go up.

* That’s how I earn my crust at present.