Why I decided to delete my NetGalley account

I’ve always been a pretty anxious person. I stress over the little things. Creating a NetGalley account was both amazing and terrible at the same time. By requesting eArcs I was giving my already stressful life, even more reasons to be stressed, and I wasn’t enjoying reading and reviewing any more. I recently decided I had to deleted my NetGalley account and I feel so much better.

I think I created a NetGalley account in March last year. That’s when Belgium went into lockdown (for the first time lol) and I started having a lot of free time. I didn’t post a lot on my blog because I didn’t have any ideas as to what I was supposed to write, so having a NetGalley account definitely helped with that. I could read books and review them and create content for my blog.

I found myself “joy requesting” a lot. You know when you see all these new books in the bookstore, and you just have the urge to buy them, well I had the same with requesting eArcs. I saw all these new releases that I was so excited about and wanted to request them all. I just loved getting the ‘your request has been approved’ mails.

I have read some amazing books thanks to NetGalley, and I’ll forever be grateful for the that, but the constant feeling of having to read was exhausting. The pressure of having to stay above your 80% mark was so stressful, and I’m glad that’s over now. I’m a huge mood reader so it was really hard to force myself to read my eArcs. I couldn’t pick a book up that I had been wanting to read for years, because I felt I hard to read all my requested books.

It wasn’t even that my ratio was at 20% or something. I had a minimum ratio of 70%-75% and I had maybe 6 books left to read. But the days were passing and I wasn’t always in the mood to read. Some books were released in October of last year and I still hadn’t read them in January.

Knowing myself I would’ve kept requesting books if I hadn’t deleted my account. Requesting eArcs was pretty therapeutic if I’m being honest. I realized these couple of weeks that I don’t have to read all the new books that are being released. Being on Twitter and Instagram isn’t always easy, because you feel this pressure of having physical copies of every new book. Especially on Twitter because you want to be able to talk about these new releases with your mutuals. But I’ve decided I will be reading more books from the library. And if I really want to read a new book, I’ll just wait for it to come out and buy it.