Tagged: book blogging
The 2014 Mad Reviewer Reading Challenge Has Begun!
(The draw for the 2013 prizes will be held on January 4 so if you’ve finished the 2013 challenge please let me know.)
Yes folks, The Mad Reviewer Reading & Reviewing Challenge has begun for 2014! All your reviews from now until December 31 count toward your goal. If you need a reminder of the rules click here. Just remember that if you signed up but didn’t provide a link in either your profile or your comment you aren’t officially signed up. Please contact me with a link as soon as possible!
And if you haven’t signed up for the challenge but would like to please read the rules in the link above and comment on either that post or this one! You can join anytime in 2014 and can count any reviews you’ve already done for the year toward your goal.
Below are some of the awesome book bloggers that have decided to join the challenge this year. Anyone who is a returning participant is indicated with (R) beside their name.
The Best and Worst of 2013
It’s 2014 already! Which means it’s a new start for everyone, a time to improve a little bit. And I certainly intend to improve my blogging. That brings me to the point of this article: analyzing my 2013 stats.
But my yearly round-up isn’t just about stats! No, I’ve always thought this blog is more than just stats so I want to share with you posts I thought were particularly good/enjoyed writing as well. Yet in keeping with my tradition I’ll introduce the posts based on statistics first.
The 5 Best Posts (Traffic)
1. The Hunger Games and Ancient Rome (5,076 hits)
2. Why Girls Hate Game of Thrones—A Rebuttal (3,287 hits)
3. The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton (1,646 hits)
4. The Day an Author Suggested I Kill Myself (1,642 hits)
5. The Giver by Lois Lowry (823 hits)
(These are just the views for 2013, not all time.)
The thing I find so interesting about the top 5 posts is that if you look to The Best and Worst of 2012 it turns out my review of The Outsiders had more hits when I had fewer followers than it has this year. It only has 1,646 hits compared to 2,615 throughout all of 2012. I’m happy my old posts are still getting decent traffic but it’s interesting how that’s gone down. Another interesting thing is that The Outsiders was my top post last year with just 2,615 hits. This year my top post has over 5000 hits. I think it’s due in part to my “Best and Worst of…” series but also because the post has simply been shared lots and I’ve had more traffic overall this year. Continue reading
Discussion: Book Review Request Forms
As I cryptically hinted at yesterday I will be changing the way I accept book review requests in the future to avoid such a horrible backlog. How will I do this? Well, instead of leaving authors with no guidelines which they seem to take as an invitation to be lazy, I will make them fill out a form. Yes, some authors will rail against the injustice of it all and how much time it will take, but those are the authors I really wouldn’t want to review anyway. If you can’t follow my rules, I’m not going to read your book. Plain and simple.
So my question for you guys is this: What would the ideal book review request form include? Would you ask authors for things like the genre, book blurb, target age group, etc? Do you think a review request form is the way to go? Or should I be trying something else to avoid my backlog as well as badly behaving authors?
Professionalism and Book Blogging
I’ve had a lot of things on my mind lately, but the main one has been professionalism. Both in real life and here on my blog if I’m perfectly honest. In real life I wear my professionalism like armour because I am in a male-dominated industry with mainly male clientele. I’ve found that I’ve been doing the same thing here on my blog although writing certainly isn’t male-dominated any longer.
Everyone has differing opinions about whether book bloggers should conduct themselves in professional or semi-professional manners, whether they should be charging for book reviews (good or bad) and whether unpaid bloggers like myself should have a certain degree of professionalism in their conduct. (Especially when it pertains to our dealings with authors.)
As much as I wish I could sometimes, I have no control over the conduct of others. But I have total control over my own. So here are some thoughts on my complex relationship with professionalism:
1. All dealings with authors are as professional as possible until I’ve developed some sort of rapport with them.
Basically, when an author contacts me for a review and my submissions are open I try to behave like I do at work with a client. Once an author and I develop a certain rapport, it’s okay to be a little informal. Would I behave as I do with my closest friends? Of course not. But there’s nothing wrong with a little teasing and banter as long as it’s mutual. I’ve made some pretty awesome author friends that way: Diantha Jones, Andy Szpuk and Luciana Cavallaro just to name a few.
2. My personal friendships with authors don’t affect my reviews.
As you guys have noticed the author friends I’ve mentioned here are ones I’ve given good reviews to previously. Do I give them good reviews because I consider them internet friends? No. I’d give my own late grandmother a bad review if I felt that her writing wasn’t up to snuff. (As it just so happens, she wrote a beautiful memoir before she died and her writing is, in fact, excellent.) Although it seems like a lot of authors have trouble with this concept I believe that generally the book and the author are separate. Criticizing a book means you are criticizing someone’s work, not them personally. It’s a thin line for some, but it’s a very important distinction from my point of view.
3. Blogging is important to me, but it’s not my main priority.
While I like to think I do devote quite a bit of time to my blogging I’ve always acknowledged that while my blog is high on my priorities, it’s not my top priority in life. I work six days a week and this winter I’m taking on even more work to help subsidize my trip to BEA 2015. So are my posts always going to be super top quality? No, but they’re going to be the best I can do at the time. Will I be all caught up with my author review requests by Christmas? Sadly, probably not.
And that’s why I’ll never call myself a professional blogger. To be a truly professional blogger I’d have to dedicate far more time to my blog than I can at the moment. 20 hours a week is more than enough at this point so I’ll stick with my semi-professionalism.
4. Full disclosure to my readers is not something I will compromise on. Ever.
Call it the wannabe journalist in me, but there is one thing I will never compromise on and that’s telling the truth. If I received a book for free from an author in exchange for a review I’ll tell you at the beginning of said review. If an author friend asks me if I can post about this upcoming special sale they’re having I will as long as I’ve read and enjoyed their previous work and add a caveat in the post. If I’m posting for a blog tour, I’ll also let you know. If I’ve personally approached an author asking if I can review their book, I’ll definitely let you know.
You guys, my readers, have the right to know where my books come from and what possible influences or biases I have. That way you can decide for yourself whether to trust me or not. I’ve been as transparent as possible on this blog and I really hope that shows.
So now I want to hear from you guys: What do you think of my tidbits about my own professionalism? Do you share the same philosophies? Do you disagree with some of the things I’ve said? I’m genuinely curious here because professionalism is a pretty hot button topic within the reading and writing communities. Please let me know in the comments below.
Discussion: Posting Schedules
If you’re not a blogger like most of the people reading this are, you probably don’t know how much work goes on behind the scenes to keep a blog organized, especially for book bloggers. Even small book bloggers like myself with a little over 500 followers are sometimes booked up one or two months in advance! So how do I keep everything straight and make sure the right posts are published on the right days?
I have print out calendars and actually pencil in the posts I’ll be doing for each day. Yes, I’ve tried doing this digitally but it doesn’t work. Having the calendar staring me right in the face helps because I can easily ignore digital calendars. So every Sunday I sit down and pencil in what posts I know I’ll have to do for the week. If I’ve sent out a review to an author who requested one, I’ll have to pencil in that review for exactly one week later. If I’m doing a blog tour, I have to make sure that I have a) read the book, b) written the review for it and c) make sure I don’t schedule anything else for that day. Sometimes it’s hard.
So what I want to know is (whether you’re a book blogger or not): how do you keep your posting schedule straight? Do you have a physical calendar like I do or are you more tech-savvy? Do you even bother having a formal schedule for your posts or do you just have certain days you know you’ll post and wing it?