dovegreyreader

This piece, written for a book on marketing and publishing books seems to say just what dovegreyreader scribbles is all about so it's copied here.

Out of interest I've placed a map widget on dovegreyreader scribbles just to see where all the visitors come from. Within days the map is a mass of blobs from Outer Mongolia (yes really!) to Hawaii, from Alaska to Cape Town and all points in between.
This always serves as a salutary reminder to myself, sitting here in splendid rural isolation in Devon, of the scope and reach of a litblog. Worldwide conversations about good books are facilitated in comments which in turn become the oxygen of any blog. It was initiating that conversation that interested me most when I decided to set up dovegreyreader almost three years ago.
Sharing a love of good books, and I only write about books I’ve loved, books that have touched me, engaged me and captured me all seems like a fairly harmless occupation but one which seems to have stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy with literary critics so let’s be clear about one thing. If you send me your book I will not be writing a “review”.
I harbour no pretensions about being a book reviewer, let alone a literary critic, this is about sharing a subjective passion for reading with like-minded people. A lifetime career in community nursing and a late onset degree in English Literature hopefully give me some capability in that direction and both underpin much of what I write, but this is all done for the love of it, unpaid and for pleasure.
So what’s the point of wasting a book with me then?
Well, honesty, transparency and integrity are the bywords of dovegreyreader scribbles and I hope the blog now has a reputation for that, so if I write about a book with bouncy, pouncy, tigger-like enthusiasm, tell people why I would press it on them if we met in the street, how this book has added another wondrous mile to my lifetime’s reading journey and just might add to yours too, then I would beg to suggest that can at least do a book no harm and is perhaps better than no coverage anywhere at all.