So, when I was a kid I lived in the middle of nowhere in Iowa. My closest neighbor was about a half mile away. We didn’t have cable or video games or much of anything to do. What I had was my imagination and piles and piles of books. My parents had a love of reading, one that they nurtured in me as well. From garage sales, auctions, used and new book stores we collected our bounty.

Here I discovered some of the writers that helped me escape the world when things go too real, too painful or just too stressful. The Hardy Boys by Franklin Dixon. Robots and Empire by Isaac Asimov. Just about everything by Stephen King. Ed Greenwood. R.A. Salvatore. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Just to name a few. I read everything I could get my hands on. My local and school libraries provided me everything from Sweet Valley High to the most recent Encyclopedias. Yes, I was the kid that read the Encyclopedias. They were great. Try it sometime.

Back then there was a limited supply of books to read. You had the classics, the pulp novels and all the new releases. I kept an ongoing record of titles by authors I wanted to read and when they were coming out. At one point in my teens this info was in a special black book, that I think some assumed was a very different kind of little black book. Sue me. I was, and am, a nerd. All the way through my younger days I kept up with this little ritual. Then I got out on my own, ran out of money and had to get my reading at the library when I could.

Luckily, I moved to a bigger city with a more extensive library. So for awhile at least I had my book addiction covered. Once I had enough money I started buying books. At last count, before I moved and had to sell them or gift them to my parents, I had hundreds of books. I kept a lot of my hardcovers (many bought off the discount rack) and old favorites. When I got my first ereader things got easier to organize but harder to keep track of.

Things started to get seriously hard to keep up with. Besides the traditional authors you had a whole crop of independent authors. My tracking system of even my favorite authors got out of control. So what do you do when you are faced with too much to read? You overload. That is what happened to me. I started reading a book or more a day. The intellectual gluttony was one step past stupid.

Burn out set in and I turned to other pursuits. Writing had always been a pastime of mine. I had short stories, a huge epic fantasy story I am still working on, and had written a ton of adventures for various role playing games over the years. See previous nerd comment. So beyond playing video games I wrote a lot. After a break from reading I came back and tried to get this all organized into a manageable system.

Yeah. Right. Not going to happen. Have you been out in the electron universe lately? There has been an explosion of just about everything out there. Want a book on emotionally unstable farm animals that want to stop computers from being built. I kid you not, someone has probably written and published it. Yowzer. Before search engines it was impossible to find anything on the internet. Now even with search engines it is impossible to find anything.
There are websites out there that try to help people find the things they like. But how do you find the site that talks about the kind of book you like that has the book you might want to read. Yeah. Reread that sentence and you start to get an idea of how enormous this problem is getting.

So the only way that you are going to be able to fix the problem? It is time for readers to use the internet and get social. I am not talking about FB. They are turning into a corporate juggernaut that has only one interest. The bottom line. Nor any successor they might have. This problem needs to be fixed at the grassroots level. You need to do your part.

First? Find a book that you LOVE. Not like. Not want to curl up with once and awhile. One that you would go out and buy in HARDCOVER. Then? Go to every website like Amazon, B&N, Google, Goodreads, etc and write a review. Post the stars but then jot a short, or long, note about why you feel that way. Don’t worry about whether or not it is Shakespeare. Just write what your opinion is. After that you tell anyone you know that likes books about that book and tell them they should buy it.

If each and everyone of us does this we not only help others find the books they will now love, we will also help the authors we love to keep writing. Remember to do this from the heart, to make sure that you put your energy into helping books you love find readers that will love them.