Should Book Reviewers Get Paid?

I was thinking the other day about how many books I have sitting and waiting to be reviewed. And now that publishers have begun to send me books, that list continues to grow with each new query. So when a new book arrived yesterday, I plopped it on the fiction shelf and kept going. Later I decided to organize my shelves (I like them to be alphabetized by author), I noticed books on the floor stacked up neatly in piles, I looked at my bookshelf and noticed I ran out of book shelf space once again.

Looking at the near 500 books on my shelves, I said, "Lena, if you got paid for reading every one of those books, you'd have it going on." Which would make me eternally happy and of course I'd spend it all on more books or shoes. It's a disease, an unyielding circle of addiction to books and shoes. Better yet, reading books in pretty shoes....the life. Add a glass of wine and we have perfection.

However, at the same time, I personally would feel less credible as a book reviewer if I did except payment. Yeah, yeah, we get a free book to read as payment and then giveaway if we please, but that's it. Reading books everyday, it's time consuming. Not to mention you have a life already, trying to juggle a writing career, a husband, five kids and a house in the midst of being remodeled after the hurricane hit a couple of months ago. Some sort of payment should be necessary.

Authors and their publishers need us, just like we need them. They need a fair review, we need to have our book fetish needs met. But I think in the world of media and Internet; publishers and authors may need us more. So how can book reviewers get compensated? I have a few ideas of my own.

• If you request a review. You must send your own copy for us to read. No ifs, and, or butts about it.

• If you want an interview for your author, cool beans. But the author needs to come to the blog and answer questions and comments by readers by the end of the day.

• Send out a personal shout to the reviewer or their blog site. Mention the blog in your tweets or your Facebook page. You want us to tweet about your wonderful book right? Give us some love too.

• The book has arrived. I'm sure you think we are excited and overjoyed. Which we may very well be the day it arrives, but once it's read, we give it away. So much for the love huh? We have to keep our readers wanting more, just like you do. So why not include a tote bag or additional swag items, so we can keep the books we really love or better yet, send two books. I'm sure there's lots of books and swag laying around somewhere in a closet, on a shelf, in a box collecting dust. Open it and send it to us. We bloggers want it.

• Recommend our blog to other authors, publicists, agents and media consultants. If we are good enough to do your review, we should be more than capable of doing others in your literary circle. In the end your writer wants notoriety and bloggers are writers too. We may not want to be notoriously famous, but blogger love never hurts.

Now that I've listed five ways I wouldn't mind being compensated, what ways would you like to be compensated or should book reviewers be compensated at all?