Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

Hello everyone! Happy April! I know I haven’t posted in a few days, and honestly, I think I just needed a quick break. I want to work on a couple of posts – possibly three if I finish my current read – and I feel like I need to focus my time on writing those with a bit more clarity. Two of them will be reviews, and one of them will be a discussion post. I haven’t done discussion posts in a long time, but I read a review of my current read that made me think about writing this one, and I will need to set aside some dedicated time to think and write about it.

So in the meantime, I’ll probably be posting a bit sparingly until I get my thoughts together. I still wanted to participate in Top Ten Tuesdays, though, since that one can give my head a bit of a break for the moment. I like this topic since I didn’t pay attention to publishers until I started doing book reviews. When I was just a regular reader when I was younger, the publisher never hit my radar. I just cared about whether I liked it or not. Now, I seem to pay more attention to the publishers of the books I’m reading, and I try not to read exclusively from the Big 5/4 publishers. Indie publishers are fantastic, and there are also a lot of self-published novels that are hidden gems that need more love and attention! I hope I’ll be able to remember some of them for you here.

Self-Published Books

I’ve noticed that a lot of the historical fiction mysteries that I like are mostly self-published, and I have to give a major shoutout to Hoopla for having those audiobooks included in their collection. That’s how I’ve been getting through the series that I like and hopefully I’ll be able to find them all. I need to try more self-published books out there, and I’ve been using Hoopla to help me figure out what to try.

Indie Published Books

For me, indie published books are any books that are published under an independent publisher, not an imprint of one of the Big 5/4. Technically, I could have included some books published by Disney on here, since they aren’t one of the Big 5/4, but I know that’s a pretty huge company so I didn’t want to include it. It’s interesting to see what’s considered an independent publisher and what’s an imprint of one of the Big 5/4. OR, seeing that an indie company has their books distributed by one of the Big 5/4. Does that distribution note make a difference? Honestly, I don’t know. Someone would have to let me know about that.

I know that producing audiobooks takes sooooo much money, to the point that some self-published authors aren’t able to do so. I wish there were some sort of low-cost options to do it since it’s another way to make their books more accessible to those who can’t physically read or just prefer audiobooks. I feel like that’s one of the reasons why I don’t read many self-published books, and that’s not the authors’ fault at all. And it’s not just producing the audiobook, but also having a quality audiobook. I’ve heard some people complain about audiobooks sounding like people are eating or something while they are reading it? I don’t know how true that is but that kind of shocked me. I haven’t come across any of those – and I’m really lucky for it – but I understand how having a low quality audiobook can deter readers from wanting to continue. That happened to me with another book series that I read for a review. I could NOT handle it because of the narrator and the quality of the recording.

And I’m off my soapbox! It’s time to sleep. Hope to see you soon!