1. Set yourself some sort of rule as to how many review copies (if any) that you will accept. It is very easy, especially in the beginning, to get carried away and accept every book that is pitched to you. Then as deadlines start approaching you can stress yourself out. I try to only pick the books that I probably would have read anyway and only allow myself to have about 10 books at any one time.
2. A continuation of the previous, don’t let your blog stress you out. Blogging should be a hobby and thus be something you enjoy and look forward to. If you notice yourself starting to get stressed about blogging, you should re-evaluate your blogging habits and what is causing you this stress. I try not to get too bogged down by due dates. Things happen in life that causes you to not read/blog for various reasons. The world will still continue to turn even if you can’t get that big review posted today.
3. Keep yourself organized. I use a free calendar that I can download into a Word document and I input review dates and other various posts and I color code everything for recognition at a quick glance. You can also use Google Calendar or the like if it works better for you. Also, try to keep your email inbox organized somehow. I have separate folders for author/book review requests and another folder for generic blog things.
4. Consider keeping a reading journal or some type of note taking system when you read. I know that it can sometimes be weeks before I write a review and by having my review journal I can look back and see what I was thinking at the time. It also is good practice to actually write notes that you will understand later – I have had several occurrences where I had no idea what I was thinking when I wrote a note, which was obviously important to me at the time I wrote it.
5. If you want to improve the number of visitors to your blog – get involved! The more you are out there the more people know of you and will come and check out your blog. Comment on sites that you visit. Another thing that I have noticed increases the community of your blog is responding to comments left. I like to respond to comments within my comment section, but you can also respond with emails.
6. Find the best time for blogging for you, but also make sure you have enough time for your family and friends. I personally do most of my blog writing in the early morning on the weekends. My boyfriend sleeps late and I get up early – so I do my writing before he gets up and am generally finished when he is ready to start the day and I still have time to do everything else. Then during the week I just go through and respond to comments and check out other blogs. This works for me, you can find what works best for you.
Well, I hope some of these tips will help you from falling into some of the same pitfalls that I did early on. If you have any blog questions at any time that I might be able to help you with please feel free to drop me an email!
You can check out other posts like this at the Armchair BEA blog where there is a link-up of today's posts.
Copyright © 2011 by The Maiden’s Court
I haven’t done a lot of actual blogging this week, but I have been partaking in blog related things all week and I am just now feeling recuperated enough to start sharing it all with you. As many of you know, I went to NYC this week for BEA. I navigated my way by car, train and finally foot to reach the Javits Center on Thursday – and was totally unprepared for what I found! I checked in and picked up my name tag – it was so exciting to see my blog name and “press” beneath it. Then we set off.
The place was HUGE and I was so visually over stimulated that I didn’t know where to start. My boyfriend, Nick (from 
It was a little difficult to find historical fiction books. As I said previously, the layout of the floor was by publisher. So you had to figure out which publishers carried our type of books and then find them. Another difficulty was that many of them hadn’t really brought their hist-fic with them, Sourcebooks being one. But, I did talk to many of the publisher reps and was given people to get in contact with for review copies if they didn’t have any with them.
I was also able to hit up 2 author signings, both happened to be at Random House. Allie had wanted to go to Jennifer Donnelly, with her new book, Revolution, which started at 1:30. Nick and I got in line, because it started forming early, to hold places. I got a book signed for myself and Nick got Allie’s signed for her – as traffic near the Javits was pretty bad and Allie got there a little late. Then later Allie and I stood in a MASSIVE line that wrapped around on itself several times, for Sara Gruen’s new book Ape House. Allie and I also got our pictures taken with Nigel Barker from Project Runway (I don’t have the picture yet) and I got a picture of Tony Hawk.
Friday was all about bloggers and blogging at Book Blogger Convention. There were sessions all day about “Creating Content”, “Author/Blogger Relations”, “Ethics” etc. Many of these were very informative and I will have a post upcoming this week about the things that I learned during this trip. It was so good to have bloggers and industry people in the same room. We were able to learn from each other what some of the frustrations are and how we can work better together. I think this was such an important event for book bloggers. It was also awesome to be together with a group of people who are doing the same thing that I do. Normally blogging is such an individual endeavor – but this experience was AWESOME! We also got a huge bag of swag on the way out. There were two great historical type books included:
