Tagged: blogging
The Best and Worst of July 2013
Well, July was actually a pretty good month for me. I got some serious reviewing in, writing 7 reviews in one day and 5 in another (and spacing the rest out like I normally do). I also did some serious reading and have begun requesting more from NetGalley which I really shouldn’t considering my author backlog. Ah, the wonders of procrastination!
Overall monthly views are down from last July (3,937 compared to 4,350 last July), but that doesn’t really concern me at this point. It may be that WordPress changed the way they’re counting statistics or it could be that people weren’t visiting my site as much. It’s not a big deal considering that I began the month with 413 followers and ended with 462! Followers are more important than views to me, so getting almost 50 views in one month is quite an accomplishment. It seems that the more followers I already have, the more I attract.
But enough rambling. Let’s take a look at the 5 best articles of July 2013:
1. Why Girls Hate Game of Thrones—A Rebuttal
2. The Hunger Games and Ancient Rome
3. How to Write a Review Request
4. My Least Favourite Book Tropes
5. The White Queen by Philippa Gregory
For once, there are four newcomers to the top 5 list, three of which were published just in July. My Game of Thrones article is frankly, no surprise. I published it at the beginning of the month and am still averaging 15 views per day on it. It’s particularly SEO friendly and clicky so it’s spread around through social media more than my rants usually do. Similarily, How to Write a Review Request and My Least Favourite Book Tropes were articles/rants that were easily shared and promoted discussion. And of course, The Hunger Games and Ancient Rome continues its streak at the top. As for The White Queen, well, The White Princess just released and there’s quite a bit of buzz surrounding the series at the moment.
So what articles were the worst 5 this month?
2. The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel
3. There Comes a Prophet by David Litwack
4. Kushiel’s Scion by Jacqueline Carey
5. Look What Just Arrived! (#3)
Again, no real surprises here. They’re all either self published books, old books or old articles. It’s a shame that so many good books end up on my bottom 5 list in terms of hits, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re still good books. It would just be nice for the authors to have a little more publicity, especially in the case of indies.
So that was how my July went: a blur of books and work (ah, tourist season). How was yours? Are you reading anything interesting?
How to Write a Review Request
Sometimes I think things are so obvious that I couldn’t possibly need to write a tutorial on them. Review requests seem like basic common sense to me, but judging from the number of requests I’m still getting despite having closed submissions over a month ago shows that some authors have no idea what the heck they’re doing. So in my usual list format I’m going to go through the steps of writing a book review request email that won’t make reviewers want to punch you.
Credit: Eating Y.A. Books
Step #1: READ THE REVIEW POLICY!
Due to the generally family-friendly nature of this blog I am resisting the urge to swear to emphasize my point. Regardless, the first thing you should ever do when visiting a book review blog looking for a blogger to review your book is read their review policy. How do you find a review policy? Well, it’s either under its own tab at the top or side of the web page or is generally under FAQs. If it’s not under any of those, use the search bar. Once you find a reviewer’s policy, ask yourself these questions while reading it:
a) Is this reviewer open to submissions?
b) Is my book in the acceptable genre list?
c) Does my book meet any other requirements?
d) What other information do I need to collect in order to make a request? Continue reading
eReader Update
Well, thank you so much to everyone who suggested eReaders for me! It was really helpful to see all of the different opinions, especially from people who use eReaders a lot for the same purposes I want to. Since it would be difficult to respond to all 18 of the comments I received from you awesome people, I thought it would just be easier to announce my decision here on the blog.
I’m getting a Kindle Paperwhite. It seems to be the best choice and was the most frequently recommended one in the comments section. It’s also far below my budget of $200 and has great memory capacity for my purposes. I won’t be buying many ebooks from the Kindle store, but it will be so useful to take my reading with me wherever I go rather than being glued to the computer for hours at a time. With the amount I read I doubt it will have the 8 week battery life that they say it does, but that’s not really an issue at this point. What matters is that it’s light, small, has an easy to read screen and it’s the most convenient for my purposes.
When I’m getting the Kindle I’m not really sure, but it will be sometime this year. But let me say thank you so much to everyone who put in a suggestion. It was awesome to hear suggestions from people I trust! I don’t honestly know how I could have done it without you.
The Lure of Paid Reviewing
Money rules the world, whether you like it or not. You need money to survive and you definitely need it to live a comfortable life in 99.9% of the world. That’s pretty much an acknowledged fact. In order to get money and by extension survive, we sometimes work jobs that we hate because they’re the only ones around.
But what if you could get paid for doing what you love? What if the thing you love most is reading and writing about reading? What if you’re an avid reader like me and could get paid for doing what you love the same way writers get paid to do what they love?
Tempting, isn’t it?
Continue reading
The Best and Worst of May 2013
Well, I’ve come around full circle. Last year in May I started my Best and Worst of… series and never thought I’d still be doing it a year later. But it turns out I like analyzing my stats and hearing your thoughts on them as well. Therefore, I’ll now be adding years to the series.
Anyway, May was a record-breaking month, surpassing February, March and April in terms of page views in one month. In the month of May I received 4,627 page views, with 2,508 of those being unique views. That’s pretty good and I’m hoping it will continue to be a trend. So what were some of the best posts for this month? Let’s take a look:
1. The Hunger Games and Ancient Rome
2. End of Days by Eric Walters
3. An Apology to Self-Published Writers
4. The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
Amazingly, there’s two articles up here that were just published this month, rather than the same old articles I’ve had up for a year. I’m proud to say that my apology to self-published writers reached so many people and got such a great response. I thought long and hard on publishing that article, but decided that doing the right thing was more important than my embarrassment at admitting I was wrong. The reading speed article did surprisingly well, likely because it really engaged a lot of people. It was fascinating to see how fast other people, both regular readers and book bloggers read.
Now for the worst articles of May:
4. Run Like Jäger by Karen Bass
5. Victoria: May Blossom of Britannia by Anna Kirwan
When you think about it, none of these are really surprising. Some are old books that were never popular to begin with, some are the first books in trilogies that are or almost are finished and one is a self-published book. The latter, The Show by John Heldt, is a great novel, but it just doesn’t seem to be getting much traffic lately.
Well, that was pretty much how my May went. How was yours? Are you reading anything good at the moment?