Blogger Recognition Award

I’ve been nominated for the Blogger Recognition Award by both Victorious Pages and A Song of Books and Coffee, both of which are relatively new blogger buddies of mine, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know them. Go check ’em out! Thanks for nominating me ladies!

The Blogger Recognition Award is an award given out by other bloggers. (Because all the other awards aren’t??) (To be honest I’m still trying to figure out blog awards. They seem similar in every way to tags…) But this is a nice way to be recognized as I know my blog is currently followed almost exclusively by other bloggers. It’s nice to know I’m not putting anyone to sleep!

The Rules:

• Thank the blogger who nominated you and provide a link to their blog.
• Write a post to show your award.
• Give a brief story of how your blog started.
• Give two pieces of advice for new bloggers.
• Select 15 other bloggers you want to give this award to.
• Comment on each blog and let them know you have nominated them & provide the link to the post you created

How I Started

I feel like I’ve been telling this story a lot… Sorry if you’re tired of reading it!

I’ve been reviewing books on Goodreads for three or four years now. It wasn’t something I necessarily have taken very seriously, and I’ve tried a lot of different things to see what works for me. However, I find that Goodreads isn’t necessarily the best community for talking about books, mostly because of how it only shows the most popular (i.e. the oldest) reviews. And the discussion questions are basically only frequented by people who are in the process of adding the books. So. I was looking for a better community.

I had thought about starting a book blog for a really long time, but I didn’t for a couple of reasons. Partly I knew from doing past blogs that I might not keep up with it. And that even if I did keep up with it, people wouldn’t necessarily read/comment, and then what would be the point? Because I really just want someone to talk to. I also knew that I wouldn’t have all the time in the world for the social media aspect of a blog, what with being a full-time teacher and a mom and a chorister. (Incidentally, sorry social media followers, I have definitely been neglecting. But I’m not THAT sorry. A girl’s gotta have priorities.)

In the end I decided to just give it a go and see what happened. I’ve been completely overwhelmed by the results. I mean, yeah, it’s awesome that it’s only been like 4 months and I’m already over 200 followers, plus 500 on Twitter and 200 on Instagram, but that’s not what I mean. I’ve made some really cool friends that I’ve gotten to actually talk about books with!, which is really the whole reason I’m here. This is such a cool community and I’m so happy I made the decision to become a part of it.

Advice

1. To quote Ricky Collins quoting his VC, Catherine De Bourgh, “Content, content, content!” I think a big part of the reason I’ve done so well so quickly was that, initially, I’ve been able to post literally every day of the week. Except Saturday. I take Saturday off. To be fair, I have a LOT of back-logged reviews I’ve been posting, which has helped. But even so, tags, discussion, blog-style posts, all of it is content. And people like to read content. Plus, I’ve noticed, a lot of times they like all that stuff better than reviews anyway!

2. Read whatever you want to read. If you’re not enjoying it we won’t enjoy reading it. Don’t feel like you only have to read a certain genre, or only books published this year, or only ARCs, or only ANYTHING! I, for one, will enjoy reading any review you post. If I was reading other people’s blogs right now… Which I’m not… Because teaching is the biggest black hole in the universe…

Nominees

Haha, yeah, 15 is NOT going to happen.

• Darque Dreamer Reads
• Little Blind Book Finds
• The Caramel Files
• Kristin Kraves Books
• Egg Reader
• Diary of a Bookfiend
• Naty’s Bookshelf
• Flavia the Bibliophile
• The Orangutan Librarian
• Teacher of YA
• RiverMoose Reads
• MNBernard Books (if you want me to stop tagging you than stop being awesome)

I won’t be offended if you don’t do a post. But I want you to know I appreciate you. 🙂