Awards: Blogger Recognition

I was nominated a longggg time ago by Sydney @ Books and Stuff. Thank you very much for the nomination! I have a ton of  fun reading your blog and talking to you about so many different things over the last few months! And I was nominated more recently by meena @ Tattooed Pages.  Thank you very much meena! She has a fantastic blog complete with a great explaination of how she rates her books (that *facepalm* one slays me!). Check both of these lovely ladies out when you get a chance!

The original award was created by Eve @ Edge of Night. It was created to celebrate bloggers in the blogosphere and to spread the love!

How did seriesous reviews start?

I can vividly remember the moment I finished Requiem by Lauren Oliver and how severely disappointed I was in the finale. I had been following the series since it started (approximately 3 years) and felt like I had wasted so much time on a series that ultimately let me down.

Around this time, I was also thinking about writing reviews for all the books I was reading. I thought about just reviewing things on Goodreads but I’ve always loved HTML design and graphics and thought it would be fun to do that on my own website.

Most blogs have a niche and I’m a pretty versatile reader if I do say so myself, so I wasn’t sure what my “niche” should be. But finishing Requiem on such a bad note got me thinking, what if people reviewed all the books in a series and told you if the entire series was worth reading in the first place. Before you picked up that first book and dedicated your time to reading all the books in the series. Of course, this works well for series that have had all the books (or at least most of them) published but not so much for the brand new series. And what about standalone books? I read those too!

And so I had my blog breakdown: Single Sundays (standalone reviews), Series Reviews, and Fresh Fridays (brand new series reviews). Add to it Movie Mondays (book adaptations) and Toonie Tuesday (an homage to the $2 coin in Canada) and I had a whole wack of reviews to write!

My Advice to New Bloggers?

Try a little bit of everything! Don’t be afraid to try out new features and don’t be afraid to stop them when you aren’t inspired by them any more! I think lots of people get stuck into a rut where they feel compelled to continue a feature despite finding it to be tedious to do.

Don’t worry about your blog stats! Easier said than done, I know, but as long as you enjoy doing what you are doing, the statistics you want will come in time.

Comment on other people’s blogs and respond to comments on your own! I was really bad at this when my blog first started and I feel like I did myself (and my blog) a disservice by not connecting with all these really cool people. If you want comments on your own blog, you need to show interest in others. The blogosphere is a really nice place and the people love to talk books, etc. and are more than willing to comment on your own blog when you comment on theirs.

You need to follow others in order to get followers on your own blog. It might seem intuitive but sometimes I think we just expect people to pop up out of nowhere just because we hit a publish button. Again, I didn’t follow many any blogs during my first year of blogging and I feel like know I missed out on making great connections with so many amazing people.

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My Nominees:

I have to do a MASSIVE award tagging in the near future so be prepared folks!

But I also want to nominate anyone who reads this! It truly means a lot when you read my posts, even if it isn’t a review or something that doesn’t have a discussion.

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Final Award?

I have decided to make my blog Award Free starting now. I’m not really good at tagging people due to a lack of time (school has officially started back up again) and I don’t want to be that person who kills the spreading of blogger lover and appreciation. I’m going to be tagging people over the next few weeks for the various awards I have to catch up on.

I thank you all for the consideration with your nominations and send you all the love back in the world.

 Rules:

1. Select 15 other blogs to give the award to. You might have to do some searching, but you can find those blogs. You can’t nominate yourself or the person who nominated you.
2. Make a post to show off your award! Talk about how your blog got started and give some advice to the other bloggers out there. And share the fancy picture!
3. Comment on each blog to let the blogger know that you have nominated them.
4. Link to the original post at Edge of Night that way anyway can find the original guidelines and such.