Wow, I can’t believe Joyfully Jay has officially been live for a month now!  I am having a great time with it and I hope you all are too. I really appreciate all of you who have taken the time to read my reviews, comment on the posts, or share information about the blog with others.

So far the feedback has been good and traffic is increasing pretty steadily. But if anyone has any thoughts they want to share, please send them my way.  I am still learning as I go so I am happy to hear any feedback you all have.

On that note, I wanted to mention a slight change in reviewing going forward.  One of the things I have had the hardest time with is giving a score to the books I read.  Writing the reviews has been surprisingly easy.  As I mentioned before, my mind is hard to shut off and most of the time the review seems to write itself in my head before I even get it out on the computer.  But grading is so much harder.  It is difficult to boil down all kinds of thoughts and ideas into one specific grade.  But alas, that is part of this whole thing.

The hard part seems to be making the distinction in numbers between books that I like. Basically conveying differences, while still making it clear that the book is good and worth reading.  So one change I am going to make is to start using quarter points in rating instead of just half points. I think that this will allow me to show more of distinction between “OMG, I love this book, I will keep it under my pillow forever and please bury it in my coffin” and “Great book, really liked it, you should read it too.”

So from today onward, this will be my rating scale.  Unfortunately this means that things reviewed up until now won’t totally match up, but I don’t think it makes sense to revise those after the fact.

Just as a quick recap, here is the basic scale I use:

5 – Loved it, one of my very favorites ever, I will keep it under my pillow forever
4 – Excellent book, I really enjoyed it and would read it again
3 – Good book, enjoyable read
2 – Ok, I probably wouldn’t read it again, likely wouldn’t buy it in hindsight
1 – Didn’t enjoy it, not worth reading
And all of this is posted under About Reviews at the top of the blog.
So I think that is it for now.  Hope you all are having as much fun as me. This fall promises to be quite busy and I hope very exciting over here at Joyfully Jay. Thanks to all of you for coming along for the ride!
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