Reader, Writer, & Writing Teacher
With the start of the new year, I thought I’d give you a list of my most popular blog posts from 2015. So in case you missed them, here they are! Also if there is anything you want to see me write about in 2016 please let me know in the comments! Continue reading “Most Popular Posts of 2015”
Hello readers! It is still amazing to me that I can use the word readers plural and that more people than just my mom visit the blog. All I can say is thank you. Earlier this week through top ten tuesday I was asked to make 10 blogging confessions, it really got me started thinking about what’s working on the blog, what isn’t working, and what changes I might need to make once I go to New York. I love love love everything I do here, but realistically 5 posts a week takes up a lot of time and fitting that in with school/work/moving to a new city seems like I might be setting myself up to get burned out. I also know I’m doing certain things, like posting on Sundays, that aren’t working. Continue reading “Take My Blog Changes Survey for the Chance to Win an Amazon Gift Card”
It’s top ten tuesday time. I felt kind of stumped when it came to coming up with blogging confessions, but I put my thinking cap on and came up with some confessions of being a book blogger. Let me know in the comments what strange/interesting blogging confessions you have of you own! Continue reading “Top Ten Blogging Confessions”
Time for some self reflection courtesy of Tope Ten Tuesday, a weekly book meme run by The Broke and the Bookish. Without further ado here’s what I came up with:
Bloggers, what are your favorite aspects of blogging? Readers, why do you read book blogs? Is there something I could be doing better?
I feel like this is a fairly predictable and therefore unimaginative subject, butI have something to admit, that probably isn’t that surprising. I’m not just blogging because I like books, and I like writing, and I like Alee, and I like etc. The blog was actually born, in my mind, out of more mundane, perhaps crafty, purposes. A mixture of wanting to learn wordpress for work and feeling the need to create a “platform” so that I can brand myself and some day be a super successful writer and not have to worry about amassing skills to put on the fifth line of my resume. I put “platform” in quotation because what did this mean to me besides a piece of jargon that gets thrown around blogs like this one. Did I expect to stand on the blog for success, not depend on my ideas, hard work, and writing skills? Do I still?
It was this desire, along with the fact that I like books, and I like writing , and I like Alee, that precipitated my initial conversations with Alee that lead to this blog. We had a period of planning. Then we started. And it has been more fun, and easier to fit into my schedule, then I could have imagined.
But 7 weeks in the doubts began to whisper in my ear: Am I creating my platform? Am I writing with a purpose or using this a diary? The answer in this post is unfortunately clear to me. It was these doubts, just whispers not declarative statements, that attracted me to Jane Friedman‘s webinar from Writer’s Digest Tutorials on building an author platform through blogging. Some things she said made me feel better. A lot of things made me feel worse. Mostly, I decided to see where this takes me and try and figure it out once we’ve put more time into. I thought I’d share some, not all because everyone should watch it themselves, of the things that she said that stand out in my memory.
So many more things were covered in the webinar, which you can purchase here. I know it’s $$$ so another great resource is this article on their website today. As for my doubts, I think I will take Jane’s advice and wait to see how this project evolves over the year before worrying about brands and platforms and etc.
Alison Doherty 