Sunday, May 31, 2015

Blogger Recognition Award

Today, I was told by one of my regular visitors, in a comment, that they had nominated me for a 'Blogger Recognition Award'. 

Now, I have this award, there's a few things I have to do to pass it on to the people I've nominated. 

1.  I must thank the person who nominated me.
2.  I must write a piece about my blog - to show it off - and talk about my how my blog came about, and then give a bit of blogging advice of beginners.
3.  Select 15 bloggers to share this award with and post their link down the bottom. 

Well, first thing's first!  I must thank Captivated Reader for this, as she's always been one of the first people to either read my posts and comment on them. She's also a fellow Bookcrosser who I helped into getting a blog together when she was hoping to get herself into the blogging world.

My Blog's Story

Okay... now, some of you know why I write this particular blog, but a lot of you don't.  As a majority of you know, I'm a huge collector of books.  But as to why I started the blog in the first place?  Well, it was basically to review all of my books in one place for the world to see them as I did.  
And because I have a huge collection of books which cover a variety of genres, I knew there would be a lot of them people across the world, on the net, who wouldn't have seen these book in their lives. 

Like I said, I'm a collector... so I have books which are rare, signed and out of print.  I was putting them all up on my blog here in the beginning.

Then, I ran out of space for pictures and started using the links to put photos up through photobucket.com. and it was easier for you guys to see more of my books through my photo album on there.

My blog started changing - morphing if you will - into something different, better. I started talking to authors and letting them know I had reviewed their books and they were willing to speak to me and do interviews with me as well.  I also got out of the office and started going to bookstores around my city and doing reviews on them. Then, e-books came into play and I started working on the differences between the traditional books and e-books, and how they are much of a muchness... and yet found no matter how you read your books, so long you're reading, it's all the same.

So, my blog has morphed in so many ways, changing in the ways of a garden does when it grows and is improved by the gardener.  It's been getting better and better over the years.  I've been writing books and reading them; but I've never moved away from this blog because of my love of books - collecting, reading and writing them alike.

Blogging Advice

Now, if you'd like to start your own blog, it's easy and hard.  The hard part is picking your platform - which blogging program you'd like to use.  There's plenty out there to pick from - WordPress, Blue, Blogger and others.  However, I've found a few of them a little complex for the beginner and chose Blogger for it's ease and also it doesn't expect you to be a computer whiz. You do have a certain amount of space for photos, though, so get used to using the link button up the top when you're posting. And it's great when you want to change your templates - however it'll feel complex at first, it's not  after a little while.  And the best thing with Blogger is that you can have quite a few blogs on differing subjects under the same manager and it doesn't cost you anything.

Okay, the high-tech stuff is out of the way, it's time to have fun... enjoy writing your blog. Make it colourful, speak the way you want to on it. I've got a few which consent forms on them (which is in your settings) and just be yourself... there's really no rules to blogging; except to keep up with it so you keep your followers interested.

Speaking of which:  it takes time for people to know you... so it might take a couple of years for people to follow you.  Facebook is a good place to share your blog. Also getting fellow bloggers - who blog on similar subjects as you do - onto your blog is a good thing.  You can make plenty of friends online through blogging.  For me, it's the list below... well, some of them:

Book View Cafe
Dreamworld Books
True Book Addict
The New Dork Review of Books
Calico Writes
The Space Between
Excelsior
Debbie Robson
The Passive Voice
Becky's Book Reviews
Wet Panty Stories

Oh no!  I have only eleven links... bummer!  These are the most recent bloggers on my 'Further Reading' on the side bar.  The others near the bottom are over two months old; and I don't want anything too old to be looked at here... sorry it's a few short.  Until my next post, happy reading.

2 comments:

  1. I enjoyed reading your post! I liked reading your tips on blogging, especially about which blogging platform to use. Thanks for getting your post up so quickly. :-)

    Happy reading!!

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    Replies
    1. Hey, you're welcome... I enjoyed it. :D

      And I attended a seminar about building a blog and found out that there is more than just Blogger and WordPress ... a lot more; so thought to put that down. However, I do find that Blogger is the easiest to use and most people don't want something too hi-tech. They want easy, they want something where they don't have to know codes and they don't have to fiddle with it too much... so Blogger is the better one out of the bunch.

      Plus, Google runs it.

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