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.
One Sentence Summary: An evolutionary biologist tries to apply lessons from his field in his community, opening up a wide-ranging discussion of evolution, scientific research, and the scientists who do the work.
One Sentence Review: Reading The Neighborhood Project is like sitting down for a conversation with a favorite professor, full of personal stories, research questions, gossip about other scholars, and a range of topics that are more- or less-interesting depending on the reader’s predilections.
Book Blogger Appreciation Week is coming up from September 17 – 17, 2010. As part of the process of being part of the directory and being able to vote on awards, as well as being eligible for awards, bloggers need to register.
I’m just sneaking this in a day before the deadline, which is tomorrow (July 7). If you haven’t registered yet, you should do it — even if you don’t want to be nominated for an award, registering helps put your blog in a category and be part of choosing blogs in your peer group.
It hit me a few nights ago just how much I love everything about reading.
I love being asked for a book recommendation, then giving one I think is exactly right.
I love looking at my bookshelves and knowing every book on it, the story, the characters, the cover, the feelings when I finished.
So this is about a week late, and for that I apologize. As I mentioned in a previous post, last week just got away from me and I didn’t have time to think about the BIP until about Thursday night. I decided to wait until today to post so there was more time to do [...]
One of the things I miss most about my undergrad English classes is having people to sit down and talk about a book with. Blogging is great, but sometimes I just miss talking with a group of people. I might be in luck, however, because this year UW is trying a new campus common reading [...]
Yesterday morning I tweeted about an article from Problogger about a secret blogging alliance he stumbled across while interviewing one of the members. Basically, it’s a group of seven bloggers, all about the same size in their particular niche, that teleconference weekly and work together on all sorts of blog projects. Of the seven, five [...]
