Archive for the ‘blogging’ Category
Calling all Book Bloggers
Posted on: August 8, 2012
hey you! Yeah, you with the teetering stack of books to read and the book blog that I read all the time.
I need to talk to you for a minute.
Your blog is an awesome way to promote the books you love. Thanks to you, my “books I want to read” list explodes weekly. Thanks to you, I’m spending far too much money at the local family owned bookstore, demanding they carry the newest titles of my favorite authors, putting books on hold before they even hit the shelf. I’m sure you’ve done the same.
Bloggers. Bookstores. where’s the connection?
Many of you already know about the rockin’ awesome project I’ve started with Elizabeth of Dark Cargo. Some of you have even already started participating. A few of you were even part of my little trial experiment a few months ago! It’s called Bookstore Bookblogger Connection, and it’s for bloggers (like us!) and bookstores (you know, those peeps we give all our money to!), to have a connection.
it’s the NEW social
Posted on: April 17, 2011
Yesterday, I led you to believe that blogging/reading can lead to anti social behavior. It wasn’t a lie by any means, and we had a good laugh, and many of you hit on where the next direction I was taking this.
We’ve all had the experience of asking our friends and acquaintances what they read, often to have half of them say they haven’t finished a book since college, and the other half reads authors that don’t interest you in the slightest. And don’t worry, they feel the same way about your M John Harrison, Tim Powers, and Cathrynne M. Valente. We’ve all been known at one point in our life as that weird person who reads those kinds of books. 
Our homes and apartments are often overflowing with books, many of us are on a first name basis with local librarians and probably carry more than one library card. We’re often fluent in the language of interlibrary loan. There isn’t much we won’t do for our fix.
Bibiophiling and blogging the results can often highlight our genre specific tastes, sometimes making it even more difficult to make book friends “in real life”.
But we’ve got WordPress, blogger, twitter, facebook, and tumblr, who needs old fashioned socializing in real life? In some ways, us bloggers are the pioneers of the new social. We’ve massaged wordpress to find new bookfriends for us (yay tag surfer!), we know the ins and outs of twitter beyond following Jon Stewart and Perez Hilton.
Our main goal in this blogosphere experiment is to find people who have similar interests as we do. People who like vampire steampunk, or new weird, or alternate history or epic fantasy or hard SF or whatever. Beyond the hours of reading every week, we’re spending additional hours writing blog posts or podcasts (or both!), commenting on the articles written by friends, and communicating via twitter. Many of us have had personal conversations with the authors that got us addicted to our genre of choice in the first place. We send fanmail, we go to conventions, we’re active in forums.
Yes, I said hours. That’s in, more than one hour, every single day. And if that’s not a commitment to being social, I don’t know what is.
Blogging isn’t anti-social: it’s the new social.
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