I generally don’t talk a lot about my personal life on Brad’s Reader because I don’t want to bore you with the mundane details of my life. But there is something I feel the need to share.

There is a big change coming my way. My wife is pregnant with our first child. It’s a boy! The name is being kept under wraps until he’s born – which can be any day now. She is full-term (and very uncomfortable) so we are just playing the waiting game.

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Friday Link Love has become a regular feature here at Brad’s Reader since  late 2007. Every week I post links to other blog posts and articles that I find interesting and/or helpful, that I want to share with the rest of you. I always look forward to compiling each week’s Link Love feature.

However, lately I’ve been feeling like I’m posting links from the same sources over and over again. In other words, things are getting stale. The blog posts and articles I link to are still great, I just need some “new blood.” Also, searching out links from new sources is very time consuming, making it very difficult most weeks.

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I just wanted to post a quick announcement that I will be a guest on the show Conversations LIVE! with Cyrus Webb tonight at 8pm EST. The topic will be ‘The Business of Books.”

Other guests on tonight’s program include authors Zetta Elliot and Christopher Hertz, Todd Rutherford of Yorkshire Publishing and book reviewer Joe Pinkney. This is a great lineup of guests from across the publishing world and I’m thrilled to be a part of it.

You can also join the conversation through chat by following this link The Business of Books, or by calling in at 347.426.3645.

And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter for updates, interesting links and more.

As Brad’s Reader grows, so does the amount of comment spam. I’m still spending more and more time deleting spam comments, which now seem to outnumber legitimate comments. It’s a fine balancing act because the last thing I want to do is discourage people from participating here. I love reading your thoughts, opinions, experiences and so forth.

So, in order to reduce the time I spend dealing with spam, I’m going to start implementing a few changes that probably won’t affect the majority of legitimate visitors who want to leave a thoughtful comment.

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Over the last year I’ve been thrilled to see Brad’s Reader grow, with the number of visitors increasing each month. The only negative part of a growing blog is a growing problem with comment spam. While my filters do a good job keeping most comment spam out of my hair, a fair amount is still getting through. This means I’m spending more time marking comments as ‘Spam’ and less time writing posts.

Back in April 2009 I posted my comment policy, which is pretty straight forward. But I should probably highlight some of the main points again.

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I just wanted to take a moment to wish everyone on the intertubes a happy holiday! The snow has been falling in the Chicago area, meaning we might have a white Christmas this year – but playing havoc with the roads.  I’m planning to lay low, visit some family and try to relax as much as I can.

I also plan on getting a lot of writing done. I have two fiction projects I desperately want to finish so I can make them available on Smashwords (aff link) as soon as possible. These two works will be available for free so everyone can sample my fiction without forking over your hard earned cash

Have a great holiday over the next few days and please stay safe. I’ll back to my usual posting schedule either this weekend or early next week.

- Brad

P.S. There will be no Friday Link Love this week.

As Brad’s Reader gets more and more comments, the number of spam comments has also increased. I don’t see a lot of them because of the filter I have in place, but a few do sneak through. I generally try to give people the benefit of the doubt, although it can be a tough call sometimes.

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The current Brad’s Reader Giveaway contest is now closed for submissions. A winner will be picked and announced either later today or tomorrow. Thank you all who submitted an entry. I was approving your comments for as long as I could until I finally had to cut them off. As I said before, the winner will be picked completely at random.

If you don’t win today’s contest, don’t worry, there will be at least one more this month. I’m not saying what the prize will be or even how you will enter – you’ll just have to stand by.

Thanks again for all your comments. I enjoyed seeing what everyone is reading and will be adding a few of these titles to my growing reading list. I hope you visit Brad’s Reader again and write more comments, it always makes my day!

Good luck!

As promised, today marks my Brad’s Reader 3 Birthday/Anniversary giveaway. The prize will be a $25 Amazon gift card. I’m keeping this really simple: To enter to win, all you have to do is leave a comment under this post. What are you going to comment about? Tell us what the best book you have read in 2009. That’s it. You need to give the title and author. If you want to explain why it has been your favorite book of 2009, you are more than welcome to do so.

I’ll leave the comments open on this post for 24 hours, after that, no more comments will be accepted. I will then pick a comment totally at random. This means I take the number of comments from first to last and use a top secret, highly complicated random number generator to pick a number. Once the number is chosen, the corresponding comment will be the winner.

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December is now upon us and 3 years ago this month Brad’s Reader was born. This blog started on the Blogger platform with posts mostly about literature and a little about writing. Ebooks and publishing weren’t on my radar at that time. I was lucky to get a few visits a day. In fact, to boost my numbers, I’d post little ads on Craigslist advertising my new blog. The ads gave me a few more daily visits, but more often than not, they got flagged and were removed.

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