Today's Topic is: What Makes A Book Blog Work?
The best I can do for this prompt is to simply tell you how I keep this blog running!
Blue Eye Books has only been a thing for about a year and a half and it's really a small miracle that it's still here! I'm such a procrastinator that some authors are probably kind of upset with me for taking so long to read their books. All I can say in my defense is that I have a LOT of stuff going on in my real life right now and in the past year so it's been difficult to put together quality reviews for authors that deserve them.
So how is Blue Eye Books still alive? I like to think it's persistence but honestly, it's probably mostly me being stubborn and wanting to help all of those authors out there that want to have their books known to the world.
Here's a list of everything I do on a weekly basis that keeps this blog up and running!
1. Review writing. This is the staple of any book blog and it's the backbone of mine. You may have noticed that I'm getting away from the memes a bit and back to my roots as a book blogger. I really love writing reviews and I read a LOT of books so I'm in no shortage of material! It's the time element that gets difficult. A lot of times, I'll read a book twice - the first time for overall feelings and enjoyment and the second time for key moments and actually remembering the entire book as well as writing notes. That whole process takes about 4 hours total. Then comes writing the review. I can actually put together an entire review post in about 30 minutes.
2. Email. My email inbox is crazy. I get about 100 emails on any given day with 60 that are in there as reminders to myself. Yeah... I'm really not that organized when it comes to task lists. People keep telling me I need to create a task list and just go down the list but that just doesn't fit with me. If I send an email to myself, I'll actually see it every time I open my email and I'm constantly reminded. I subscribe to almost every blog I follow through email so I'm sure to visit them. I love reading other people's posts and commenting so that usually takes an hour and a half every day.
3. Updating the review list and currently reading. I usually do this once a week (normally on Sunday's). I'll update the review list by adding reviews that were published that week as well as updating my currently reading with whatever book I'm reading at the moment. I can't update it every time I start a new book because I would be changing it every two days and as I said before, I usually go back and reread books anyway.
4. Designing new graphics and learning to code. I've been wanting to change my blog design for a while but I don't know enough about code yet so I've been taking an online course through Khan Academy to learn coding along with my school work. However, I can design new graphics for new features on the blog through Canva so I usually do that a couple times a month. It normally takes me about 30 minutes to design a new graphic if I already have a picture in my head of how I want it.
5. R&R's and author coordination. This includes responding to R&R requests, blog tours, and other things involving speaking to authors and publishing companies. I've actually cut off R&R requests for the moment until I finish my list and I've only been signing up for the bare minimum of blog tours because of my major time issues. So for now, this is really only like 30 minutes a month.
The life of a book blogger does take some serious work but honestly, if you really love doing it all, it doesn't feel like work. The fact that I have to do college essays, scholarship essays, school, NaNoWriMo, BookBlogWriMo, and research projects really takes up my time and is the only reason I've been really behind this year. Senior year is more crazy than I anticipated!
How much do you put into your blog? Is it worth it to you? What are the biggest things you do as a blogger?
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