In the comments to the post below about my TBR stack, C.T. Henry asks an interesting question that I pulled out to answer here:
Did you request most of these books or were they just sent to you?
Usually, publishers send me the books automatically, without me having to request them. That's the easiest way to operate and it ensures that the books are at least considered for review.
Sometimes, though, the system doesn't work so smoothly and I have to seek out the books and request them. This is a lot more inefficient and doesn't always work particularly well. For one thing, it means I have to be aware of the book in the first place. (I try to keep up with everything, but often books slip through the cracks anyway.)
Also, it means I have to either figure out who the publicist is or just start querying people at the publisher to try to track the book down. For those publishers where I have good, ongoing relationships with the publicists, this is pretty easy to do. But if all I know is that a book is published by Random House, getting my hands on a copy can sometimes be more trouble than it's worth.
(As with all things, some publishers do a lot better job of sending books than others. This has a real impact on which books get reviewed. Too often I'm not even able to consider a particular book for review because I never got a copy.)
In this particular case, most of the books were sent to me, but a few I had to request.