Book Blog Expo Day 4: Blogging Advice

By -
It's the last day of Book Blog Expo, hosted by Donna at Girl Who Reads!

Day 4 - June 2 - Blogging Advice. Do you have tips to share or need help with some aspect of your blogging? Today is the day to give and ask! This is a time for the blogging community to shine by helping one another out.


Well, I have very little advice to give.  The way I do blogging is not really designed to bring in the numbers!  I figure, if I start thinking of it as a job -- thinking in terms of audience and what my focus ought to be -- it won't be fun any more and I won't want to do it.  So I just do what I like.

What I would like help with is the design.  I like my fairly minimalist setup, but I would love to have a custom image/template like a lot of people do, and the person that was recommended to me seems to have stopped doing it, to my great sadness.  So if you have any recommendations for a not-too-expensive designer, let me know!

I'd also like to know the secret behind never hitting a blogging slump and always finding time to blog in no matter how off-the-rails life gets, but I suspect that those are Mysteries of the Universe that will never be solved.




Comments

  1. Girl Who ReadsJune 2, 2018 at 4:22 PM

    I don't have any recommendations for designers. I have a free template.

    As far as blogging when super busy, I find scheduling posts in advance really helps. Sundays are usually my down day so I spend it scheduling as many posts as possible - usually the full week. If I find other time during the week, and I know I'm going to be too busy to blog, then I will set up posts then. The best I've done is 3 weeks worth of posts.

    Avoiding a slump is recognizing it is coming and taking measures to avoid it. If it is because I can't find a good book to really get into, I might do recommendation lists (top audiobooks for road trips) where I can repurpose old content. If I just can't think of a topic, then I will check out the memes. Sometimes it is the interaction of visiting and commenting that I need to get out a slump. I have a team of bloggers so if I don't feel like blogging I can rely on their content. However, before I had a team and I didn't feel like blogging sometimes I would take a few days off or seek out some author friends to see if they wanted to do a guest post or feature an excerpt.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanJune 3, 2018 at 6:50 PM

    Thanks, Donna!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Admiral RontonJune 9, 2018 at 8:19 AM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Admiral RontonJune 9, 2018 at 8:21 AM

    No advice on a designer. The ones I work with here in the Bay Area are very expensive.

    A few blog slump-busting ideas:
    * Review books you read a long time ago
    * Author interviews
    * Schedule a consistent time to blog. Set your alarm 30 minutes early, if you're a morning person, or make it your before-bedtime ritual
    * Post current trends for genres you're interested in, even if they aren't books you're going to review. That may spark feedback from those who have and get community interest, giving you a wider net and more material

    I'm sure I'll think of more later. =]

    -Ryan

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more