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.
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.
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.
When I went to BEA this year, one of the things that struck me about the trip was how much blogging has brought me great friends that I would never have gotten to meet otherwise.
Some of these friendships seem a little more obvious than others, in the sense that if I met these bloggers randomly in real life it would be less strange to imagine us as friends.
The Sunday Salon is Open!
One of my favorite weekly memes, and the only one I continue with semi-regularly, is The Sunday Salon — “an informal, weekly, mini read-a-thon, an excuse to put aside one’s earthly responsibilities and fall into a good book.” For awhile it was closed to new members because the technology behind it couldn’t handle the feed. But, the organizer now moved it to Facebook and the meme is open to everyone. So visit The Sunday Salon on Facebook and join in!
Instead of doing a bookish holiday swap this year — because I need more books like I need a hole in the head — I signed up for the Book Blogger Holiday Card Exchange, a really brilliant idea from Anastasia at Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog, where bloggers sign up to send cards with book recommendations. I signed up to send two cards, and got to very exciting ones in exchange.
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!
