One of the most highly thought of
non-commercial book review websites
closes in its eighth year

My Beloved award-winning Webmaster, created this site so I could get the word out about the unusual, less-read good books I found. He's a passionate science fiction reader & often offered reviews of that genre.

Coming up in an age B4TV, we both know reading is not a careful, third-person event; it's a happening where your body has a sit-in, while your eyes & mind work miracles with words. Frequently, we read thrilling passages out loud to each other.

To help keep the site humming, we joined Amazon.com as an Associate, garnering tiny commissions from when our Readers clicked through from RebeccasReads to buy what tickled their fancy. 2 years into our association, someone at Amazon pressed the wrong button & ‘lost’ all my reviews. It took 3 months of daily emails before I was reinstated, & by then I'd been bumped from my Top Ten Reviewer status, never to regain it. Mostly, of course, because of the books I reviewed. Had I joined the herd by reviewing bestsellers, I'd have whizzed right back up. However I didn't as those review sites are a dime a dozen & I wanted to give lesser-known authors a forum in which to feature their good books. As of closing I was ranked 152 with 1161 reviews & 4026 helpful votes.

Then Webmaster designed a way for authors to get even more exposure to our readership, for a modest amount of money -- he set up New Book News, Rebecca's Book Page & In The Spotlite on our Index page -- all were highly successful. He also designed Authors & Books for writers who didn't have their own sites &/or wanted their name associated with Rebeccasreads.

Our intent was always to entertain, inform & hopefully convince you to buy the reads. For most of my career I wrote third-person, critical reviews, however, when I started this site, being of a certain age & beholden to no one, I decided to have some fun, made up my own Rating System & chose to compose personal recommendations. If I couldn't give the book a good review I rarely wrote a negative one, unless the way it was written had something to teach.

For 7 years Webmaster & I weekly served up bouquets of neat reads which my Associate Reviewers from around the world & I thought worthy of mention. We sent them out in an ezine to the growing number of double opt-in subscribers. I encourage you to search the thousands of reviews in our archives, & enjoy.

When our Internet host shut us down with no warning & recourse, Webmaster scrambled for weeks to secure alternate outlets for our site & ezine, & when the dust had settled, we were back in business with fortnightly updates. Which gave us a bit of a breather. If you've never run a website with as many pages -- over 4000 of them -- you have no idea of how labor intensive it is -- 24x7x365.

My idea was also to shed some light on how writers write, flaws & fortes, & my Interviews reveal some of the passion, adventure & everyday labor that goes into making a story into a book, getting published & dancing the publicity fandango.

Also in our archives you'll find Editorials on just about everything as well as the love of reading, writing & the trials of getting into print, several deal with helping novice writers get the hang of it.

Thereto you'll discover my adventures as a city woman who went wild in my Thoughts of a Rural Woman.

Do visit D. H. BROWN at www.dhbrownbooks.com.

& me at my new site www.rjbrownbooks.com.

Rebecca