Paid to blog?

Amanda Rutter of Floor to Ceiling Books has admitted being paid to blog about Steven Erikson's Malazan books for Tor.com.

The posts originally appeared on the Tor.com website, where you wouldn't necessarily have assumed that they were impartial, but more problematically some also appeared on her own blog, where she called the series "one of the premier fantasy series of recent times".

I've really enjoyed reading her blog, and the Erikson books I've read were fantastic, but this isn't good, and I hope that paying bloggers to read books isn't a widespread practice.

In this case I think Tor.com were clearly commissioning the pieces for their own website, and it was only enthusiasm that saw them carried over to the personal blog too.

Just for the sake of being open and transparent on my own part, nearly all the books, films and audios reviewed on this blog, at least from the last year or so, were provided to us for review.