About Us

Welcome to Elitist Book Reviews!

So who are we?

Just a couple of people with much better taste in books than you. 🙂 It’s true. Stick around and find out.

In the beginning, we figured that because all of our friends, family, acquaintances, and even random strangers in bookstores (including, sadly, the employees) regularly came to us for book advice, that we might as well give this kind of advice on a professional level.

Cue the stage lights.

We post reviews primarily for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror novels (mostly speculative stuff), but really we read whatever the heck we want. Our reviews are posted during the week, with the weekends as our time to relax. We try to get at least two up a week, but in addition to reading tons and writing reviews about everything Elitist, we also have day jobs. And families and lives, etc. So that two-a-week thing doesn’t always work out. Still, we try.

We hope you enjoy the spoiler-free reviews, and we will do our best to best to tell you what books to either avoid, borrow, or buy. You should do exactly what we say.

Seriously.

In case you are wondering, we will be brutal, and we will even be mean if we really don’t like the book. That’s part of the fun isn’t it? As a general rule though, we keep our reviews professional and only talk about the book. We appreciate it when those commenting on our site do the same. Personal attacks aren’t warranted for simply expressing our opinions. Thanks for helping us keep everything civil around here.

We’ve been around since 2009 and plan to be here until they stop printing books. Which better not be any time soon, or we might stage a coup. We started out on Blogspot, wandered over to WordPress.com for a bit, and then launched off on our own with the WordPress CMS in 2017 and have never looked back. We like to think that we’ve ironed out all the kinks of moving from platform to platform, but that might not be the case. If you find anything awry, feel free to let us know what you’ve found. Dan will very much appreciate it.

We also participate in Amazon’s Affiliate program, which means that if you like what we do here and would like to support our efforts to review and find even more awesome stuff to read, you can do so by clicking on any Amazon link and then immediately buying whatever you need to buy at Amazon (doesn’t have to be associated with the book we’re linking to — buy anything!). Then, we’ll get a small percentage of whatever you paid Amazon for your new stuff. That small percentage will help us to buy books we don’t get from publishers, acquire some more audiobooks so we can double-up on our daily reading rate, and pay for overhead associated with this website (which can get expensive). In order for us to participate in their program, Amazon requires that we put up a little legalese:

“We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.”

We also participate in a similar affiliate program with Bookshop.org. Completely outside of everything else, Bookshop.org does some really cool things for the reading community. We like them. You should check them out, especially if you don’t go in for buying from mega-entities like Amazon. At the least, you should check them out and what they do.

Last, you should know that this site is completely non-profit. In fact, it’s turning out to be very sub-profit as we currently pay all fees associated with the site hosting. Dan does all of the WordPress development and site upkeep himself. That bit about Amazon and Bookshop.org affiliate revenue? Yeah. That’s the only method of compensation we use on the site. We hate advertising in general and don’t even get us started on other “review” sites that post overly long reviews filled with Google Ads between every other paragraph. Ugh. Just no. None of our reviewers accepts any monetary remuneration or gifts for the reviews we provide. None of us are employed by any publisher or author or other group that is related to these books. We do frequently accept advanced reading copies of books (physical and electronic) from authors and publishers so that we can review their work in a manner timely to their date of publication (I’d be hard-pressed to consider any of those as gifts). The reviews on this site are not biased in any way and only reflect the opinion(s) of our individual reviewers.

If you want to check the breakout of each of our ratings, we have a page for that: Book Ratings Breakdown.

We hope you enjoy reading our reviews, but more importantly, we hope that you find something good to read. Because finding an awesome book can be an amazing thing indeed.

Happy reading!