ladybusiness | (Reply)

From:

I think I must've first encountered Elliott's books in the early 2000s, when I read the Crown of Stars series, so I read everything she wrote after that as it was published. So I was aware of her for close to a decade before the Spiritwalker books arrived on the scene, and it seems to me that they were the right books at the right time - everyone was talking about them, they got very positive reviews, and, best of all, they seem to have made everyone go back and read her backlist.

You're probably right about reviewers needing to focus on the new. I used to be a newspaper book-reviewer, and the main paper that I wrote for had a column every Sunday devoted to more reflective, personal reviews that talked about books that meant a great deal to the reviewer (books from childhood, books they encountered at a particular turning-point in their lives and so on), and I was able to talk about a lot of older books that way (the requirement was that they still be in print, or be available in that city's public libraries). It seems common for review sites to do rereads of well-known or influential novels or series, and of course there are sites like Mark Reads, which are like giant online book clubs and have the scope to look at backlists. I'm not sure how that sort of focus would translate to reviewing sites with a very different format or structure, though.