Discussion posts are some of my favourite posts to read. New ideas get shared that way, or old ideas are revisited and given a new spin. And of course, I get to be my opinionated self as I hoist my views upon others, while pretending to be objective. Or maybe not. I do welcome alternate views and I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
I might have mentioned before that I only found out about the book blogging community a few months into setting up my own blog. Before that I did look up book reviews on blogs once in a while but I’d just google the book titles to see what popped up. The only book blog I’ve regularly kept up with for more than three years now is Jugendbuchtipps.de, mostly because my local bookstore doesn’t keep a lot of German YA books on the shelves, so I need to know what I’m looking for if I want to place an order with them or order from The Book Depository. That blog however, only features book reviews, and it seems that visitors are mostly passive. A lot of people read the reviews but very few comment. Since the reviews are solid though, I didn’t really think to look for alternative blogs in the past.
Personally, I’ve come to read book blogs and engage with bloggers because I love interacting with people who share my love for books. Also, I’ve always loved to discuss anything and everything under the sun; the more passionate I am about a subject, the better. While I have many friends who are just as passionate about sports as I am, I don’t really have any friends who will talk about books with me late into the night. Neither do I have anyone to swap books, or even mere book recommendations, with. My sister has taken the easy route for years. She borrows the books I buy and rarely buys them herself. She and I occasionally talk books but we’ve not seen a lot of each other in recent years because we didn’t enrol in the same universities. We still read a lot of the same books though, so when we do have time during our vacations, we talk about the stories we’ve read—things we liked, things we disliked and ideas that intrigued us.
For me then, book blogging has come to encompass both blogging and reading other blogs. Yet I also know that there are non-bloggers out there who read book blogs. In fact, I remember from my Social Computing course in uni that only 10% of Internet users are content producers. Thus at 90%, the vast majority of people online are consumers. Unless you take into consideration prosumers who’re largely found on social networking sites but that’s another level of engagement on the net. Point is, a statistic like that makes me wonder how I can better engage readers, be they bloggers or non-bloggers.
Why do you read book blogs? What compels you to actively engage with a blog and interact with a blogger?
I was the same! I found booktube first, and than I saw people actually had blogs about books and I was just like “WHY AM I NOT DOING THIS???”. When I started up my blog I pretty much had no idea what I was doing (I still don’t lets be honest) but I always try my best to comment on other blog posts and interact with other blogs! My bloglovin is crazy because of that, but I love it.
I think I found book tubing a couple of years back but then forgot all about it. Blogging comes a lot more natural to me than vlogging because I like to write and am rather camera shy. I think it’s cool how you’re dabbling in both and trying to figure out what works for you!
It takes time to develop and I gotta say I also had no idea what I was doing besides posting reviews, which I had been doing on GR anyway before I started this book blog.
I didn’t really know there was such a thing as the book blogging community per se when I first made my book blog. I thought it was just: you post things and people somehow find them. I had no idea there were so many avenues for interaction. I thought that polite comments on other blogs was as good as it got. But I was so wrong! And I’m glad that I discovered the blogging community for what it is: fantastic. I’ve met heaps of people, and made friends, and had awesome discussions. It’s great!
As for WHY I visit other blogs … well, it’s because I love everything bookish related and I also have an interest on other types of posts that a blog may publish (especially if I love that blog or blogger). I love discussing books with people, and I love meeting like-minded people ^.^
Haha. Same! I thought maybe a few dozen of people would stumble upon my blog thanks to Google, and that’s about it. And I especially enjoy the discussions because those are great springboards for interaction with others :)
I agree with everything you said! I only discovered book blogs a few months before I started blogging myself as well and honestly, before then I didn’t even follow up with blogs that much! But reading book blogs and contributing to one myself has lead to tons of super great conversations that I’ve had with so many people. I’ve gotten to know some really friendly people and everything has just been so fun! I don’t have friends who understand my love for books as much so it’s so great to know that there’s an entire community of people who share the same thoughts as you, but also a whole community to fangirl with you and support you on basically anything else in the entire world. Bottom line: book bloggers are all just so nice and awesome!!
Yes! Gotta love the book blogging community for all the books I’ve discovered and all the people I’ve been able to interact with! You included! ;)