Attention: New URL

The URL of PODBRAM has been updated to match our name. Please change your bookmarks and other links to this PODBRAM home page or any other page on this site. The new URL is: http://podbram.blogspot.com. Any link you may have that begins with http://iuniversebookreviews.blogspot.com will no longer work. If you open the HTML page containing the link and simply change the iuniversebookreviews part of the link to podbram, the link will work.

I founded this book review site July 2006 with the intent of offering legitimate, free, professional book reviews to deserving iUniverse authors. Until the beginning of 2008, all the reviews and articles were written and posted by just little old me. At the time I founded this blog, I expected to be soon inundated with review requests, but as these things tend to happen, it took me a little longer than I originally expected to build up a sizable following of readers and authors. It wasn't until mid-2007 that I began to get overwhelmed by the number of submissions. That meant either turning away more books that might have been deserving of my attention, or adding more reviewers to the site. I chose the latter and what was then known as iUBR began to grow.

As many of you already know, there were five PODBRAM reviewers in 2008 and we are now doubling that number. At certain points in '08, we first opened up the submissions to include all POD publishers except Lulu, and then any and all publishers, from Pipsqueak Press to Random House. We still encourage Lulu authors to patronize The Lulu Book Review, but otherwise we are open for business to anyone else. We began accepting submssions from publicity firms at the beginning of this year, too.

You can accept any references to iUniverse Book Reviews or iUBR that you come across on this site or elsewhere as still pertinent to POD Book Reviews & More. Contrary to what many people may have believed, this site has never had any business relationship whatsoever with iUniverse, Inc. In fact, I have always strongly suspected that the company has intentionally remained quiet about the existence of iUBR simply because they are trying to sell their authors overpriced reviews through Kirkus Discoveries. I founded this site upon the iUniverse basis because (a) my four books were published by iU and I am quite familiar with most aspects of the company's operation; (b) I think iU has probably offered a somewhat higher level of quality than most of the competing POD firms; (c) although editing and proofreading will always be the monsters of POD, at least with iU, the formatting is professionally produced; and (d) I was able to cap the submission numbers at a manageable level by accepting only iUniverse books.

The plan is to have POD Book Reviews & More operating on cruise control within a few weeks from now. As some of you may know, several months ago I began planning to overhaul my website operations. Without boring you with the details, I can say that my other three blogs have pretty much reached the cruise control mode already, and PODBRAM is headed that way. I plan to post an update in a couple of weeks to let all the authors and readers know the new rules. There are still a few bugs to exorcise from the plan. The leading one is deciding exactly how much time I want to devote to this site and in what direction do I want to take it.