Biscuits & Books with Black Swan 03 – featuring The Rising Tilde

The Rising Tilde are a collective who write book reviews, conduct author interviews and obviously read! They review children’s books and self help books on their website. We couldn’t wait to hear from them and get this perspective which will hopefully be helpful to any authors reading. So, let’s see how it went…

BSBP: What made you want to start reviewing books?

TRT: My friends and I wanted an online platform to write and post blogs, so we created The Rising Tilde as a multi-niche blog on Medium. As time went on, we realised it would be better for our readers and us to separate the literature parts and the technology and business parts. So now we have the Medium blog and the WordPress website. 

When it comes to books, we have been avid readers since a young age. Though reading books was nothing new, we felt that that was insufficient. We can enjoy the story while reading, but any other fun is limited to our imagination. We wanted to know more about the stories, characters and authors, and we realised we could bring that to readers like us. So, on our website, we do author interviews, character interviews, guest posts by authors, character sketches and recaps of books before the sequels come out, in addition to book reviews.

We have come across incredible stories and even better people in the past few years, and we hope to keep going.

BSBP: Your reviews tend to stick to books directed at a younger audience and self help books, what draws you to these categories? Do you read other genres in your own time?

TRT: We feel that to be able to critique someone’s hard work, we should know what we are talking about. Children’s books are what we grew up with. We have read our share of books for different ages, and we have young siblings who read too. So, we feel that we can review children’s books and their message to young readers.

We consider the same with self-help books. When we agree to review one, we make sure it is about a topic we can relate to. For example, we would review a book on productivity but not one on alcohol addiction because none of us has experienced the latter. 

We do read other genres in our free time and intend to expand our reviews to those genres soon.

BSBP: What do you look for in a children’s book? What makes a book extra ‘recommendable’ in your opinion?

TRT: Young children are impressionable. If you are going to publish a book, you have the opportunity to impart important lessons about life and people through your writing. 

I look for new stories and ideas that can capture a child’s attention, maintain it and teach them something positive that they will remember.

BSBP: What do you look for in a self-help book? What makes one genuinely useful?

TRT: This is a tricky one. Self-help tips on various topics are readily available on the Internet. When I review self-help books, I look for new techniques or methods that I have not heard of before. For the book to be useful now, the question would be “Why would I want to buy this book? Is reading the book better than reading it on a website? Is the content new and worth the book’s price, or can I find it easily in a shortened form online free of cost? 

BSBP: Who is your dream author to interview with? And why? Huge question, I know, ha!

TRT:  My answer may sound like a cop-out, but I assure you it is not: I have never thought about author interviews that way. At The Rising Tilde, when the opportunity for an interview comes around, we think of ways to make it unique and fun for both the author and readers. We have done pretty well so far in trying to find out unusual things about an author or the books that we can ask about. So, I guess every interview is my dream interview because I make the most of my opportunities. We do the same for our character interviews too.

BSBP: Do you write at all yourself?

TRT: We do write as well. We post on our Medium page in our free time, and we have some aspiring authors in our team. 

BSBP: When I was growing up the children’s book ‘No Matter What’ by Debi Gliori stuck with me. Do you recall any stories you read growing up that stay with you today?

TRT: My childhood was filled with mostly Baby-Sitters Club books and any book by Enid Blyton. If I had to pick only one book, it would be My Sister’s A Pop Star by Kimberly Greene because it was very relatable. My younger sister used to run around the house singing to her heart’s content, and I used to think that she would be a pop star someday. 

BSBP: What do you want to see more of in the future of children’s books/self-help books? 

TRT:  I would like to see fresh ideas and plots. It is not easy to develop something that no one has thought of already, but I believe there is scope for many more creative stories to be written.

Where to find The Rising Tilde

Twitter: @rising_tilde

Instagram: @the_rising_tilde
Website: https://therisingtilde.com/