Tagged: blogging
Discussion: Pinterest and Blogging
I joined Pinterest just a few months ago in part because I noticed how many referrals I was getting from it. (Not an insane amount, but a couple every day do add up over time.) So I started creating various boards of varying levels of relevance to my blog and waited. I was pleasantly surprised when my referrals from Pinterest went up, particularly from the cover images of books I reviewed that I later pinned.
So what I want to know now is this: If you’re a blogger and/or author, do you use Pinterest? Has it driven any traffic to your blog? Why or why not?
Discussion: Befriending Authors
We in the blogging community often work quite a bit more closely with authors than, say, a reviewer for a national newspaper or bigger book reviewing website. One of the consequences of that is we develop pretty good working relationships with authors and sometimes those develop into friendships (insomuch as one can be friends with someone purely online). But that also brings up a big ethical question: How do these relationships affect our reviews? Should book reviewers befriend authors and review their books?
No review is completely objective, obviously. Your own experiences and likes and dislikes go into your perception of a book and the writing of the review. But being friends with an author can make writing a review a little harder so should bloggers either a) not befriend authors at all or b) not review books by their friends.
Personally I consider myself friends with some of the authors I’ve reviewed here on my blog and I still reviewed their books anyway. (This is a limited number because while I’m friends with about 5 authors most of my relationships with authors would be considered ‘professionally friendly’.) But when I write a review I totally block out any perceptions of the author as best I can. If my friend writes crappy dialogue, I’m going to tell her in the review. If the characters seem one dimensional and have very few realistic motivations then I’m going to call him out on it. Sometimes it’s hard; I’m certainly not going to claim that it’s not. However, I feel that I am generally objective enough not to let my friendships as they stand interfere in my criticism. If at some point in the future I did feel like I couldn’t objectively review a book by a friend, then I simply would not review the book.
What I want to know now is this: As a blogger do you feel it’s right to make friends with authors at all? If you are friends with an author, do you feel it affects your ability to give them an objective review? How do you balance your friendships with your reviewing principles of honesty and openness?
“people who criticiz the endings of books” and More Weird Search Terms
Yes, folks, it’s time for another weird search term round up and I’ve got some pretty bizarre ones this time around. Here are just some of the more recent weird search terms I’ve received:
people who criticiz the endings of books
i’m an artist i will not work for free
the mad warlock
goodbye farewell to a wonderful person
zombies horribles
most self published authors bad writers
pegi
mr.willy wonka;s factory write an essay the story of my name is khan
age apropiate mad books
why do girls hate game of throwns
mouse oracle
the mad zats flowers for algernon
what is the code word for walking dead november 23,2014
i’m greedy for you
{searchterms}nudist scenes
read to me the word lynburns
mad brown girls porn photo
And best of all:
did roman gladiators puke
Um…yes? Like all human beings I think gladiators were capable of vomiting. So what do you guys think of these search terms? Have you gotten any weird ones lately?
The Best and Worst of October 2014
I had another exhausting Halloween of scaring kids and then organizing a local dance, but overall I’d say October was pretty good. The good weather is holding here in my corner of Saskatchewan and although work is getting slower, the construction industry never stops around here. Add to the fact that The Walking Dead is back on and you’ve got the recipe for a pretty decent month in my life.
It was so good that I re-opened my review requests and have been getting some awesome submissions. It also didn’t hurt my stats as I received 7,317 views including 4,778 unique views. That’s pretty good considering September was awful, with 4,861 total views.
So what were the most popular posts this month?
1. Why Girls Hate Game of Thrones—A Rebuttal
2. How to Read 100 Pages in an Hour
3. Best Seller by Martha Reynolds
4. The Hunger Games and Ancient Rome
5. The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
The only new one on this list is my 3 star review of Best Seller by Martha Reynolds. It’s nice to not only get extra views from a blog tour, it’s also nice to know that some authors actually care about their reviews and promote the heck out of them. Even if they’re generally positive but not the most flattering ever. I can definitely appreciate that. None of the other top posts in October were a shocker, but it’s nice to see a new post reach the top 5.
So what were my worst posts this month?
1. Beware, Princess Elizabeth by Carolyn Meyer
2. The Eagles’ Brood by Jack Whyte
3. Pretties by Scott Westerfeld
4. Mistress of Rome by Kate Quinn
5. Kane Chronicles: The Throne of Fire by Rick Riordan
As with my past bottom 5 lists, none of these are really a surprise and I don’t think many of them have made repeated appearances on the list. Pretties by Scott Westerfeld has appeared before and that’s a shame because it’s a very good book. However, the others haven’t been on before and they are older/less popular books in general so it’s not all that surprising.
So overall, my October was pretty good. How was yours?
Discussion: Keeping Things Fresh
My three year blog anniversary is just a couple of months off and over my nearly three years of blogging I’ve noticed something: sometimes it feels like your blog is going stale. Your writing isn’t as good as it seemed to be before, you’re doing the same features over and over again, etc. You really do lose your motivation and doubt yourself every once in a while; I think every blogger experiences that.
What’s different is how everyone deals with that funk and how they keep their blog fresh. When I get in a funk, sometimes I’ll just take a day off from writing altogether (usually a Sunday). Or, I’ll start researching for an article I want to write instead of my usual four reviews in a week. That’s actually what I’m doing right now since I was just in a funk: I’m researching for an article about how history seems to be at odds with so many dystopias.
My question for you guys is this: How do you keep your blog fresh when you feel it’s getting stale? What’s the best way that works for you to get out of a writing rut? And how do you personally stay motivated to keep going?