A Big Thank You to Don’t Shush Me! for nominating me!
What is it?
This award was created by Edge of Night so that bloggers can recognize and thank other bloggers for being a part of this incredible blogosphere we are a part of!
What to do when you’ve been awarded?
- Select 15 other blogs you want to give the award to. Do some digging if you must! Find those blogs. You cannot nominate yourself or the person who has nominated you.
- Write a post to show off your award! Give a brief story of how your blog got started, and give a piece or two of advice to new bloggers. Thank whoever nominated you, and provide a link to their blog. List who you’ve nominated in the post. Make sure to also attach the award itself! (You can do this by right-clicking, saving, and uploading the image above).
- Comment on each blog and let them know you’ve nominated them. Provide a link to the award post you created.
- Provide a link to the original post on Edge of Night. That way, anyone can find the original guidelines and post if needed, and we can keep it from mutating and becoming confusing! (It happens LOL).
My Blogging Story so far
So I was going through books at such a rate and wanting to talk about them that I first set up my Facebook page a year or so ago (www.facebook.com/reading.nook84). I wrote up short reviews, posted funny quotes and images and links to books I had just brought (which there are many of!). The more I got into it the more I realised how much I liked writing about the books I love so thought I would try a hand at blogging. So at the end of April I set up my blogging page ReadingNook84 as a place to talk more about the books I read. I wasn’t sure quite how to go about it to begin with – do I do long posts or short ones, should I post daily or weekly – I then decided that I would just go at my own pace and see how the flow of it works for me. I found some great sites that give you ARCs of books for reviews and others where you can get involved in cover reveals, release blitz’s and blog tours. I think these helped me the best with posting more frequently as you can only read so much in a day (though I’d like it to be more lol!).
I do have my favourite genre’s and authors that have turned into ‘one click’ buys for me, whether in ebook or paperback. So I do tend to favour them with choosing something to read but also love getting recommendations of new books as I am always looking to widen my reading scope.
Throughout the year I have set myself some reading challenges. My Goodreads one is to read 125 books this year as an increase of the 100 I read the year before (currently on books 91 (Lost Voices of the Nile) and 92 (Silver Rain) at the moment, one to be read at work and the other at home). Along with this I have found a couple of other challenges to do: The 2015 Reading Challenge and the 2015 Bookish Bingo Challenge. If you check these out you will see a few that you can check off very easily (‘A booked based entirely on its cover’ is never hard to find) and some that are a bit harder as they might not be the type of book you would usually read (‘A Pultzer Prize winning book’). The one I found annoying to get was ‘A book written by an author with your same initials’. Now you might think that this would be easy enough to find but I have 460 eBooks and 425 books and found only 1 book where the author’s initials were the same as mine SG. Aaaahhhhhh talk about annoying as this same task is on both reading challenges. Oh well will just have to hunt down another one from somewhere.
My Advice
First things first, figure out what type of blogger you want to be and what you want to get out of it. Whether you want to be posting about books you have read or whether it is that you want to connect with other bloggers and authors. There are a lot of sites out there that can help but you may want to check out Goodreads as a first point of call. They have lots of reading groups set up already and ‘Ask the Author’ pages so you can get involved in the reading community there. Talking to authors direct is a great way to make contacts and you might even get to be a Beta reader for some of them.
Great sites to check out for ARCs are Net Galley, Blogging for Books and BookLook Bloggers. Depends on the type of book you are looking for but they all have quite a good range. To be members of these sites they prefer you to have a blog rather than just a Facebook page and like you to post reviews on the sites, aswell as Amazon and Goodreads. Some of your reviews might even get on the header pages of the sites. Other places to check out if you want to get involved with cover reveals, release blitz’s, blog tours etc are Give Me Books, Be My Book Boyfriend and I Am A Reader Not a Writer.
All in all you should just enjoy your blogging experience and do it for yourself. Have fun reading everybody!
So in no particular order I would like to nominate…
Reading Nook 