Today’s BBAW is all about how we stay connected to the book blogging community. Honestly, I don’t think I’m that great at it, and I was going to give today a miss until I read a reassuring number of posts from people saying the same thing. I love reading people’s posts, and even when I’m not writing regularly myself, there are a handful of people whose blogs I try to read regularly and leave thoughtful comments. A genuine question for people reading this, though—how in the world do you leave comments via Blogger? It must be possible, because I see other people do it, but I have never succeeded in commenting on a blogspot blog. It is not for want of trying. This is particularly sad because several of my favourite bloggers host their sites there at the moment, and I feel like I’m not letting them know how much I enjoy their posts. Disqus I can manage, WordPress is easy… but trying to comment using Blogger makes me go cross-eyed in confusion.
Other than commenting, I like Twitter very much for connecting with the community (also for tweeting slightly grumpy things about politics and enthusiastic things about #womeninSTEM, just so you know). It’s mostly through Twitter that I tend to find out about blog events. I’d like to engage more with events this year, as they inevitably introduce me to new blogs I really enjoy. It’s particularly satisfying to engage in things like Twitter chats during events, as they give me an opportunity for almost-instant communication with other people, most of whom are in completely different time zones. Of course, I have a long history of enthusiastically signing up for events or challenges and then totally failing to follow through, but I enjoy them nonetheless.
As for other social media—I do have a Goodreads account, though at present I have only three friends, one of whom is my mum. (When I log in, it cheerily says “3 friends, 729 books”, which always seems to be either a damning indictment or a pleasing summary of my social life, depending on mood). I have no idea how I should be using it to connect with people I don’t know! I mostly use Goodreads because I like to keep track of what I read; also I love intensely convoluted categorising of everything. I don’t have a Tumblr or an Instagram or anything else, and I’m okay with that. I started this blog entirely for personal pleasure, and though meeting other bloggers has turned out to be a huge chunk of that, I don’t want to load myself up with tasks that feel more like work than anything else.
I do want to give credit to Bex from An Armchair by the Sea, as I think that she puts lots of effort into connecting book bloggers with one another. I participated in the Ninja Book Swap last October and really enjoyed it; I had a wonderful time at the London Bookshop Crawl and met lots of new people (I will post about it soon, I promise); I’m also participating in the Little House Readalong, though at present my participation is exclusively in the form of tweets and comments. All of these are in some way associated with Bex, and have made it much easier for me to connect with the book blogging community. Thanks Bex (this is Book Blogger Appreciation Week, after all)🙂
That’s all I have to say, really–now I’m off to wander through other people’s blogs and find out how people who are better at this do it!
