Creative Convos: Is It Important To Keep Up With New Releases?

Hundreds of new books get released every single day – ok so I made that fact up, but it’s probably true, For this reason, I wholeheartedly believe that keeping up with releases really does not matter.

Obviously, it’s great to read a book as soon as it comes out as you will definitely avoid spoilers and it’s fun to discuss the book with others online, but I personally don’t care all that much about reading books as soon as they are published with obvious exceptions for my favourite authors.

The excitement and build-up surrounding new releases is always fun to be involved in, which is one reason why it is great to keep up with new releases. However, this can be quite hard to do because as I mentioned above so many books get published every day.

Until I started receiving and reviewing ARCs I was never on trend with what I was reading. I just read whatever appealed to me and a lot of the time these were older books. Even now I have books I bought when they were first released and I haven’t read them yet.

I think one of the main reasons why this should never matter is that people read at their own pace and will discover books at different times than others. Half of the ‘popular’ series that I’ve read I had never heard of until I joined this online book community.

Being a reviewer now means that to some extent I do need to keep up with releases, but I definitely don’t put pressure on myself to do so.

If I’ve read a book that is super old, but I have strong enough opinions about it to review it, then I’m going to do it anyway. Honestly, reviews of older books sometimes do better than newer ones because people like to have their own opinions validated or maybe they’re looking for someone to disagree with. Who knows?

I still have books on my shelf from way back that are waiting to be read and I will not be buying any new books until I have done so.

This brings me to my next point. It is crazy expensive to constantly buy new releases and I don’t know about you, but I cannot afford to do that. Reading is a pretty expensive hobby (well lifestyle let’s be honest) and the cost can really pile up – especially on newly released, full-priced books. Does that make me sound frugal? Yes, yes it does. But do you know what I see no issue with that, books are expensive.

It’s not imperative that you keep up with new releases as everyone has different approaches when it comes to reading. If you are more of a casual reader who isn’t involved in online book communities then it makes no difference if you only read books that have long since been published.

If you are a hardcore reader who likes to be involved in every online discussion about books then yeah you probably would like to keep up with releases.

Basically, just take everything at your own pace and read whatever the hell you want.


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