You may have heard of LoveReading, the online book recommendation website? This year LoveReading has announced exciting new projects and features to serve adult and child readers, and writers. We’ve been chatting to the staff at LoveReading about their story and their plans:

What does LoveReading do? 

LoveReading is on a mission. A mission to help engender a love of reading. We do that by curating a recommended reading list for our users, to encourage more people to get excited about books or re-ignite their flame for reading.

How has the site developed since its beginning in 2005? 

Born in 2005, LoveReading was launched to serve a need for recommendations to help readers choose their next favourite book. It was followed by its sister sites: LoveReading4Kids and LoveReading4Schools. After changing hands in mid-2017, a new team has been brought on board to expand the operations, modernise our offering and add lots of functionality and tools to keep our loyal community of book lovers happier than ever.

LoveReading has been undergoing some changes in the last year or so – could you tell us a bit about the changes and new features? 

It’s been a whirlwind year at LoveReading:

• We re-launched the LoveReading site in May.
• We re-launched the Kids site in early October with lots of added functionality which included giving kids their own content zone. No adults allowed ?.
• This month we published our fifth monthly podcast which included an amazing interview with beautiful storyteller Sebastian Faulks.
• This September we launched our own LoveReading Very Short Story Award
• We have partnered with Audiobooks to create a comprehensive audiobooks section and we now power the LoveReading Top 10 Audiobooks of the Month 
• LoveWriting is now live, serving as a home for self-published authors, responding to the huge demand for authors wanting our support.
• Next is the LoveReading4Schools site, which is set to relaunch later this year to better support our community of school librarians and teachers to encourage that life-long love of reading in children.

What happens in the daily schedule of the LoveReading staff team?

My schedule is all-encompassing. It’s dealing with Publishers, managing the team, project managing the development of our sites and our proposition – and I love to read! Within the wider team we live and breathe books. Our job is one of curation and selecting a wide range of relevant books across all age ranges, themes and genres and it’s our role to recommend books for our members to read next. It’s creating content, planning the next podcast, it’s reviewing the publishing schedules to select the next batch of books, and it’s reading, reading and reading some more! And then writing the reviews to engage and excite our audience.

Could you give us some top staff picks of 2018 so far?**

It’s always a tricky task to pick our favourite reads of the year as we only recommend books we love. After some discussion, our team favourites from across the genres are (in order of most recent publication date):

Flames by Robbie Arnott (a debut)

The Turn of Midnight by Minette Walters (second in a series)

The Lion Tamer Who Lost by Louise Beech

The Craftsman by Sharon Bolton

The Wisdom of Sally Red Shoes by Ruth Hogan

The Lido by Libby Page (a debut)

Come and Find Me by Sarah Hilary (fifth in a series)

House of Beauty by Melba Escobar

Sal by Mick Kitson (a debut)

Once A Pilgrim by James Deegan (a debut)

You can find these books, our Editorial Expert Reviews which explain why we love them, and much more on our site, here is a link to our Star ? Books:

https://www.lovereading.co.uk/genre/str/Star-Books.html

Follow on:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lovereading.recommends/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lovereadinguk

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lovereadinguk/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/lovereadinguk/

Podcast: https://www.lovereading.co.uk/podcast

**All the titles mentioned in this post are available from the CCB online shop and in store.