A Few Words About the FTC and Blogging

I have about 50 book blogs in my Google Reader and I've found one topic that keeps popping up in recent weeks: the new FTC guidelines and bloggers. The main issue is whether bloggers receive any monetary compensation for endorsing a product/service on their blog. And mainly the FTC just declares that "bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service." I usually do this anyway. If I receive an ARC or review copy of a book from a publisher, I tend to thank whomever sent it to me. I will continue to do that and in addition, will simply put a "Source disclosure" at the end of each book review either stating whether the book was purchased, borrowed (library), or received as a review copy.

In general, our book review policy is as follows:

1) We always give our honest opinion about a book. Even if we don't thoroughly love the book, we always try to find some redeeming quality to it and will never simply trash a book. We also tend to only accept review copies of books that we believe will be of interest to us or fall within the general topic categories of our blog (cozy mystery, children's fiction, YA fiction, adult fiction and mystery).

2) We attempt to review books in a timely manner, but can make no guarantee a book review will be published before a release date.

3) We receive nothing in return for any of our reviews whether our opinion of a book is positive or negative.

4) We do not sell any of our books whether they are ARCs or already published. We tend to keep most books because we LOVE to be surrounded by them. If we decide to part with a book either because we didn't love it, it's a duplicate, or for some other reason, we tend to pass it along to fellow book lovers through a giveaway on this blog, simply lend/give it to a friend, or we mooch it on bookmooch.com.