Happy Blog Birthday to us! 5 years old!

HAPPY BLOG BIRTHDAY TO US! It's been 5 years since ReadItDaddy started, way way back in the mists of time with our first ever review:

"No Roses for Harry" by Margaret Bloy Graham and Gene Zion (Red Fox)

Originally my wife's idea, the blog sort of sprang out of a need to try and track the books we were reading (and re-reading) from the library and evolved from there, a sort of blog 'aide-memoire'. Back in those days I also used to write about videogames, but swiftly found that writing about children's books was far more satisfying (and the people involved in children's book publishing are a lot nicer too!)

Here's a few facts and stats about ReadItDaddy that you might not know. 

1) Our most popular review (with nearly 19,000 unique page views) is a review of "The Man with the Violin" by Katy Stinson and Dusan Petricic (Annick Press).

2) Though we're a UK based blog, our biggest audience is the US - Responsible for at least two thirds of our overall audience traffic since the blog started (136,000 unique hits from the US with the UK coming second with 91,000 hits)

3) Local charities, schools and child carers directly benefit from our blog. Any review copies we don't keep are donated to Helen and Douglas House , Oxfam, The Unicorn School, and Marple Child minders.

4) Reviews are scheduled and written entirely in our (dwindling) spare time. We make no revenue from the blog (and we'd have absolutely no idea how to!) so everything is fitted around full time work and school. Lots of burning the midnight oil to ensure that we review (just about) everything we get sent.

5) Though the majority of our review material is kindly sent to us by fantastic publishers, awesome PRs and lovely authors & illustrators we also buy tons of books, borrow books from our excellent local library and write about book-related news too.

6) We're keen comic addicts, championing fantastic Brit comics like The Phoenix (https://www.thephoenixcomic.co.uk) and awesome kids magazines like Okido & Storytime and cool and interesting stuff from the US, France and Japan too.

7) We've recently had a blog overhaul, tuning things up under the hood and improving review workflows so that we can concentrate on the important business of telling you all about brilliant children's picture books, fantastic non fiction stuff, awesome chapter books and early readers and cool comics and magazines. If you keep reading, we'll keep writing :)

A gigantic thank you to all our readers, followers and the lovely book folk who continue to make us feel welcome. We couldn't do it without you!

Phil & Charlotte @ ReadItDaddy x