Despite the fact that I’m not especially great at keeping track of my goals each year, I always go through the exercise of reflecting on my goals from last year and setting some new reading and blogging goals for the next year.
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blogging
Although the Sunday Salon is supposed to be all about reading, I’m afraid I’m not planning much reading time today. Instead, I’m hoping to spend today getting caught up on blogging — comments, reviews, and end of the year posts — so I can spend the read of the month actually reading and working on my Christmas craft projects.
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Be genuine. No one likes a fake person in real life, and that goes double online. You don’t have to share all of yourself on your blog, but be sure the parts you do share come from the heart. Similarly, be kind. You may not always agree with others, but engage people with a sense of kindness rather than anger. It helps.
Reach out. Like I said earlier in the week, it takes reaching out to find community. You can write amazing posts on your blog, but if you don’t do some work to help other people find you, no one will read them. It’s just a fact.
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I started out not knowing the answer to this question. Obviously, book blogging has impacted my reading in some way — how could it not? But I started writing this post with no idea how much.
My first impulse when I went to answer that question — How has book blogging affected your book acquisition habits? — was to go to my master list of books read in 2011 and see which ones I could directly attribute to blogging. I got through April before I realized this was going to take forever and probably be impossible because, at this point in my reading life, almost everything I read is a recommendation from somewhere.
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Being part of a community takes work. That’s true in real life, and it’s true in blogging. You don’t get comments without leaving comments, you don’t get followers without following others, and you don’t feel part of a community until you do some work to participate that community.
That said, I do think there are some ways to feel connected more quickly than others, at least from my years of experience as a blogger.
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You may have noticed that June was a pretty busy month here around the blog. At the beginning of the month I privately challenged myself to post every day, and I’m really proud to say that I did it! Obviously, posting every day isn’t my normal routine; I’m more of a three to five times a week sort of blogger because that has worked for me. But May was a sort of a slump — I didn’t read or blog as much as I normally do, and I felt like I needed a challenge to get me back on track.
I’m really happy to say that I think the challenge worked. I’m feel more inspired about the blog, and I think I picked up a few good practices I can incorporate when I shift back to blogging slightly less frequently.
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Last Friday I attended the second-annual Book Blogger Convention at Javits, which was probably the highlight of my entire BEA experience. As a blogger, I can’t think of anything better than getting to spend the day talking blogging with a group of people that actually get why doing this is so important.
Because I’m a journalist, I took compulsive – but mildly unreadable – notes during the day that I’m going to attempt to summarize for everyone who wasn’t able to make it. This means that if I mis-wrote anything from the event, please let me know and I’ll make corrections.
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I haven’t talked about it much yet, but next week I’ll be leaving my dorky lair in Wisconsin to head to New York City for Book Expo America, a three-day trade show and convention dedicated to books!
Last year I only went to BEA for a total of about two days – I’d just started my new job and didn’t have much vacation. But this year I’m going all out: seven full days in New York to go to BEA, the Book Blogger Convention, and (hopefully) a little bit of sight-seeing around the city.
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My Conundrum Over Comments
by Kim on December 7, 2011 · 76 comments
This is not to say I’ve got the blogging thing figured out. Far from it, in fact. What it does mean, however, is that I have a good sense of how I operate and some ways to be at my blogging best (even if I don’t always do that…).
One area I continue to struggle with, however, is developing a “best practice” for responding to and leaving comments. I have a way of doing comments that I’ve developed, but recently it’s started to become overwhelming and I think I need a new plan.
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