the Little Red Reviewer

Archive for the ‘blogging’ Category

Fellow bloggers and book reviewers, have you ever said to yourself

“uggh, I have no idea how to review this book!”

or

“I need to review this book, but I have zero motivation to get started on writing the review!”

To those of you who are book lovers but haven’t taken the plunge into blogging or semi-serious reviewing, have you ever wondered what the secret is to writing a review, and writing them consistently?

One simple trick is the answer to all of the above.

You ready for it?

I can only give you this answer if you promise to do the following:

let me know if you’ve ever done something similar and if it has worked for you

if this has worked for you, makes sure all your friends know about this one weird trick so it can help them too.

Because from time to time, we’ve all struggled with writing reviews.

 

Are you ready?

 

are you sure you’re ready?

Read the rest of this entry »

The end of January brings the end of Vintage Science Fiction Month and the end of the Science Fiction Experience.  This is my third year hosting Vintage month, and I want to thank everyone who did a blog post on their site, did a guest post on my site, commented on a post, tweeted something, re-tweeted something, or lurked and is now interested in reading some older science fiction.  This is the best Vintage Month I’ve ever done, and I can’t wait to do it again! Of course, we’re all welcome to read older books whenever we feel like it, we don’t need to wait until the dead of winter. 😉

A huge shout out to everyone who participated in Vintage Month:

The Broken Bullhorn

this is how she fight start

Joseph Starzl

Over The Effing Rainbow

Paul Weimer

Lesley Connor

Two Dudes in an Attic

Jason Sizemore

Lynn’s Book Blog

Rinn Reads

Andrew Robins

Howling Frog Books

My Readers Block

Nashville Book Worm

Genre Bending

Tomtificate

In My Book

AQ’s Reviews

Read The Gamut

A Step To The Side

Books Without Any Pictures

Casual Debris

50 Year Project

Thanks for an amazing month everyone! Apologies that I haven’t been commenting, tweeting, retweeting as much as I planned. A frustrating work project and recent health issue have brought me to my knees.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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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some of the books reviewed here were free ARCs supplied by publishers/authors/other groups. Some of the books here I got from the library. the rest I *gasp!* actually paid for. I'll do my best to let you know what's what.