Monday Tally is a weekly link round-up of some of my favorite posts discovered over the week. If you have suggestions for Monday Tally, please e-mail sophisticated [dot] dorkiness [at] gmail [dot] com. Enjoy!
Things to Think About
Nymeth (Things Mean a Lot) wrote about how and why she writes about books. It’s quite the manifesto – here’s one of my favorite parts:
The reason why I enjoy writing about books (and reading other people’s thoughts on them) is because I find that book discussions are an excellent platform for discussing, well, Life, The Universe and Everything. They’re a perfect way for an incurable introvert such as myself to find out how people feel about all sorts of things.
Kay (The Infinite Shelf) made a comic about reading with her cat. I totally agree. Here’s the first panel – click the link to see the rest.
Jackie (Farm Lane Books) gets the best discussions going on her blog. This time? Are there good and bad books?
Becky (Becky’s Book Reviews) imagines a time when we blog without guilt. It’s a lovely thought.
There is no exact formula to follow. You don’t have to follow a certain format, a certain style. You don’t have to model what you do based on what others in the community do. Differences are a good thing. Individuality should be celebrated.
Author Maureen Johnson wrote a manifesto about the idea of personal branding. Here’s an excerpt, follow the link to read the whole thing because this is preceded by a great story:
The internet is made of people. People matter. This includes you. Stop trying to sell everything about yourself to everyone. Don’t just hammer away and repeat and talk at people—talk TO people. It’s organic. Make stuff for the internet that matters to you, even if it seems stupid. Do it because it’s good and feels important. Put up more cat pictures. Make more songs. Show your doodles. Give things away and take things that are free. Look at what other people are doing, not to compete, imitate, or compare . . . but because you enjoy looking at the things other people make. Don’t shove yourself into that tiny, airless box called a brand—tiny, airless boxes are for trinkets and dead people.
Books for My TBR
Aarti (BOOKLUST) reviewed Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle, a travelogue memoir in graphic novel form. Could that sound any cooler?
Andi (Estella’s Revenge) added another list of foodie books, including some good ones that didn’t make it to my Narrative Nonfiction 5 List.
Tara (Book Sexy Review) wrote about another cool graphic novel, Mr. Mendoza’s Paintbrush by Luis Alberto.
Rebecca (The Book Lady’s Blog) reviewed Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists, a book about the moment women became feminists. That’s definitely on my wish list.
Forkful of News, a foodie blog run by some close Madison friends of mine, posted about Ayun Halliday’s memoir Dirty Sugar Cookies, “a life story told through food.” Delicious.
Blinding Me with Science
One of the perks of my job is that I often get to scroll through the Associated Press wire, and other science news sources. There was a recent conference on sleep which yielded a bunch of cool findings.
Did you know… sleep preferences can predict MLB pitchers performance, sleep can help you be better at Guitar Hero, or that more people in the US report being excessively sleepy than people in Europe? I didn’t.
Also, spending too much time in front of tv screens and other monitors can cause back pains and headaches. So stop reading these links and get outside!
The Book Bloggers’ Toolkit
Carrie (Carrie Actually) does a lot of succinct and useful tech posts. This one on Google Reader mentioned the “sort by magic” feature, which I’d never thought to use!
Peachtree Publishers wrote an informative post about review policies and what they look for in blogs for potential review copies. Their suggestions for a helpful review policy include:
contact info, what books you will consider for review, what you won’t even touch, how far in advance you need a book, what formats you’re willing to review (i.e. ARCs, Galleys, E-books, finished copies, etc.), if you participate in blog tours, and if you do guest posts and author interviews.
Also, it’s ok to contact them to introduce yourself, your blog, and what you like to read.
I’m sure this has been around for forever, but Lenore (Presenting Lenore) has a good list of tips for new book bloggers. This was helpful to me, even though I’ve been at this for a couple years.
Beth Fish Reads did a good round-up of upcoming book blogger events including Book Blogger Appreciation Week and AudioBook Week.
Like to hold contests? Here’s a huge, huge list of contest tips and tricks that could help out. I also liked this post on the seven signs of an A-list blogger in the making — any apply to you?
More from BEA and BBC
Toby Speed (The Writer’s Armchair) had a guest post from author Selene Castrofilla, an author I met during the Book Blogger Convention. Selene wrote a really great post about why book bloggers are awesome.
Tara (Book Sexy Review) has a list of some bloggers she met at BEA and the BBC – there are some unique bloggers on the list (and me, but that’s not why I’m sharing.)
Nicole (Linus’s Blanket) got to go to the launch party for The Beekman Boys, a reality show starring Josh Kilmer-Purcell & Brent Ridge – Kilmer-Purcell is the author of The Bucolic Plague, a book I’m excited to read and that a lot of people received for review at BEA.
On Journalism
The local paper is trying a new print-first strategy, where certain stories don’t go online until a few days after they are published in the print paper.
I’m skeptical, only because the types of stories they’re holding – investigative and enterprise pieces – don’t have as much time sensitivity, so what’s the harm in waiting to read it?
Comments on this entry are closed.
Thanks for the kind words. That is a very impressive range of links!
I’m always interested in sleep. I just don’t understand how some people can get away with having so little – I seem to need more than most, which means I have less time for reading 🙁 I wish I could find a way to need less sleep!
Jackie: Thanks! I tend to read a lot of random stuff over the week, but I didn’t realize how random until I started collecting it together.
I tend to need a lot of sleep too. I would love to need less, too!
Great compilations of links. I am also always interested in studies about sleep, especially being as I love sleep so much. I somehow missed those comics by Kay about reading with her cat, so am off to check those out!
Amy: Kay’s comics are so fun. I love them.
Thanks for the link! And I especially loved Becky’s piece on blogging without guilt. Perfectly put! Loved, loved, loved it!
Andi: I liked that one too. I’ve been trying to let blogger guilt go, but it’s really hard sometimes.
How you have the time to discover all this is a mystery to me, but thanks!
Jeanne: I tend to scroll blogs between projects at work, plus click a lot of links on Twitter, which is where I find most of them. I like taking mini-breaks between short writing assignments — it keeps my brain going.
Wow, I have so many tabs open after reading this post! Great collection.
Trisha: Thanks! I love tabbed browser windows — what did we do without them??
True – it has been up for awhile, but I do keep it updated. Whenever I find a new article I find especially helpful, I add it in. So it’s also a resource for me 🙂
Lenore: Yeah, I noticed the updates. That page is a great resource for new bloggers.
Most useful thing learned from this post: Pressing V in Google Reader will open the post in a tab. My computer is so slow these days (I’ve had it six years) any shortcuts that don’t require my mouse to communicate with the internet are better.
Lots of wonderful links!
Jenny: That’s awesome. I must have missed that tip when I was reading, or got so distracted by the other ones 🙂
Nice round-up. There were several posts I had missed, so I really appreciate your pointing them out.
Thanks for the shout-out!
Beth F: Thanks! I thought doing a link round up would be a lot of work, but it’s actually a little less time consuming than I thought. And if enough people are reading it, then it’s certainly worth the time.
Thanks for the shout out to our blog! This is a great round up. I really enjoyed checking out the other posts listed on here.
Erin: Thanks for a really helpful post — there were some things you mentioned I hadn’t thought of and was able to revise my review policy more.
This is a nice collection of links. I particularly liked the one about review policies by Peachtree Publishers. As I’m fairly new to book-blogging, I had been thinking it is presumptuous to put up a review policy. But maybe I should create one, just in case. 🙂
Christy: I don’t think it’s presumptuous to have a review policy, although I didn’t have one for a very long time when I started blogging. I think it’s nice to at least know ti’s out there when pitch e-mails come.
I love the way you put this all together!
Amanda: Thanks! It’s a fun sort of feature to put together.
I love your Monday tally’s, but it takes me most of the week to get through them…too much good stuff!
And I just learned the “v” keyboard shortcut for Google Reader…very handy!
softdrink: It takes me random times over of the week to put them together, so that’s about right 🙂
I love this list. I especially found Carrie’s article on managing RSS Feeds quite intriguing. I am definitely going to have to check out some of those features. Thank you for sharing!
Michelle: I thought that was really helpful too — I learned a lot of good stuff in it.