I have a lot happening this week. The kids are out of school for spring break, which means I’ll need to find someplace else to work for most of the week. (Already this morning, I’ve been interrupted twice thrice four times with family issues. In between, I could hear the TV blasting upstairs and the music pounding downstairs, with me in the middle.)

I’ll need to find somewhere else to work so that I can complete the book reviews I’m ready to post. You see, I’m finally launching my new eBook Reviews blog. I managed to get the first review up this morning, and I’ve got others scheduled for the rest of the week. As you can tell from the title of the blog, I’ll be posting reviews of novels and memoirs that are available in electronic format, for e-readers and the like. Most of these titles are also available in paperback (and some in hardcover, too).

I recently finished Holly Lisle’s out-of-print romantic suspense, I See You, the story of paramedic Dia Courvant, who rescued the sole survivor of a terrible car accident, to find her own husband dead in the wreckage. Now, four years later, a series of deadly car crashes has brought handsome detective Brig Hafferty into Dia’s life. She’s drawn to Brig, but can she trust him enough to tell him of the terror that stalks her? Because Dia has received a message warning her of danger and death, a message that seems to have been sent to her from beyond the grave.

Authors and publishers, in my opinion, spend way too much time sucking up to literary critics, which is why I decided to become a book reviewer.

Of course, no critic actually deserves the respect he gets (myself included), not for his opinion in any case. And I dare say, publishers wouldn’t give critics the time of day, were it not for the fact that bad reviews can severely hurt sales of a good book, and that good reviews can severely boost sales of a mediocre one. That’s why it’s more important to pander to the tastes and whims of the critics, than to publish books that would actually please ordinary readers.

Authors are not much better, because most authors believe, on some level, that literary critics actually know what they’re talking about. So when a critic doesn’t like the book she wrote, she believes that there’s something wrong with her, because the critic said so. Fortunately, there’s a simple antidote to this line of thinking: the 5 rules of book reviews, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Not too long ago, Jess C Scott sent me a PDF of her first indie novel EyeLeash: A Blog Novel, to kick off a series of book reviews I’ve wanted to do, of indie and mid-list novels and memoirs.

EyeLeash is the private journal of Jade, a 17-almost-18-year-old girl, who recently graduated from an all-girl high school, wants to lose her virginity with Novan, a boy (now turning into a man) she knew from earlier in her life, and struggles with how she should accomplish that.

This novel is written in an alternative format (as a personal online journal), and it’s risqué for a YA novel (because of all the talk about sex). Surprisingly, the format did not distract me, and the story kept my attention. It became clear to me early on that not only did Novan have an emotional attachment to Jade, but Jade also was whipping herself up into an emotional attachment to Novan, even though they both said there was nothing between them. As the story progressed, Jade descended from confused to disturbed to pitiful. I began to feel sorry for Novan, wanting to tell him just to forget about this girl, because she has to get herself together before she could be a viable partner to any man.

Here what it is: Write a simple, one-paragraph review–good or bad–of one of their books, and post it on a free site. I’ll show you how to write such a review easily and quickly. This kind of review is great for posting on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, GoodReads, Google Books, and other similar sites. You can even turn it into a quick blog post, with a little bit of enhancement. The review does not need to go into detail as to what the book is about, because that information is already on the pages where you’ll be posting your review.

Here’s how to write one: