The Writing Life: Writers Are Readers

I’ve been making regular trips to my local library since I was a young reader. As a child, I read stacks of biographies from the local library on different well-known people. My bent toward reading such stories, has influenced my own writing and partially explains how I’ve written a number of biographies on people like Billy Graham, Luis Palau, Chuck Colson, Billy Sunday, Samuel Morris, John Perkins, Sojourner Truth and others. Throughout the US, there are thousands of libraries. Do you use them on a regular basis?

When I speak with writers about their manuscripts, I will often ask if they read books in their particular area of expertise. Years ago I met an older author who had written a romance novel. Romance is the largest genre of fiction and a popular area. When I asked if he read romance novels. He said, “No, but I write romance.” His weak response did not help his pitch for his romance manuscript.

As a general rule, writers are readers. To support other writers, as I read a book or even hear an audio book, I will write a short review and post it on Goodreads (almost 900 reviews) and Amazon (over 1,000 reviews). No one pays me for these reviews and I do them outside of my work time and in my free time. Publicity expert Brian Feinblum has written about how to support books and authors. Some people estimate over 11,000 new books are published every day (including the self-published books). Each of these authors need people to read their books and write a review. To help people in this area, I created a free teleseminar (follow the link).

Do you have a To Be Read (TBR) pile of books? I know some people have several stacks of TBR books. On a regular basis, authors and publishers will send books to me. Here’s a couple of books which arrived last week. Bob Tiede offered to mail six books and knowing my volume of books TBR, I encouraged him to only send a couple. One of the books he sent was Leading With Questions. He asked me to take a photo of myself with the book and send it to him (which I did). Then he also asked me to post my photo on social media (which I also did). At this point, I’m still working on whether I’m going to read and review this book or not. Even if I were reading full-time and getting paid for it, I would not be able to read and review all of the books which come into my home. It is simply impossible.

I opened a package of books and it included a hardcover copy of The Dragon’s Prophecy: Israel, the Dark Resurrection, and the End of Days wrapped in this package. Notice this book does not release in the bookstores until September 3rd. I’m unsure if I will read it or not since in general I do not read or write about books on Biblical prophecy. I do applaud the creativity of the publicity people sending this package. It definitely caught my attention.

Sometimes a publisher will send me an Advanced Reading Copy (ARC) of a forthcoming book. Scholastic Press sent me an ARC of When We Flew Away, A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary by Alice Hoffman which releases September 17th. This 8 to 12 year old book from a bestselling novelist looks intriguing and like something I “might” read. As of this writing, I’m uncertain. These books are just a few of the ones which came into my mailbox this past week and show the variety of books.

Do you read in the area where you are writing? What is on your To Be Read pile? Do you support other authors and write reviews? In the comments, let me know and I look forward to reading your experiences.

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This prolific author and editor explains how writers are readers. He gives the details about why this simple habit is important for every writer. (ClickToTweet)