I'm participating in the Story Siren's Debut Author Challenge. The guidelines are below:
CHALLENGE OBJECTIVE
To read and review a minimum of twelve young adult or middle grade debut novels between the dates of January 1, 2012 - January 31, 2013.*
*The 2013 extension is so that December Debuts can be read and count toward the challenge.
RULES AND GUIDELINES
You must have a blog to post your reviews or be a member of Goodreads.
Your blog must be written in English.
Deadline to join is May 31, 2012.
BOOK GUIDELINES
Must be a young adult or middle grade title.
Must be the author’s YA or MG debut, released in 2012.
If an author has a previous novel published for adults or children, they can still qualify for the challenge.
If an author has a previous YA or MG title, they do not qualify for the challenge.
As many of you know, I've run monthly One Sentence Debut Reviews, covering three books each month (technically, I've only done 10/12 months, but you get the idea). Next year, for sanity purposes, I will lump my debut reads into three posts for spring, summer, and fall releases. I will continue to give away bookmarks/swag for books debuting in 2012.
Anyone else participating this year?
A couple of days ago, Kristi from
The Story Siren posted an entry about
Bloggers and Authors. It opened a discussion to all of us about whether Blogging is a such a good way of
promoting books.
To us, the bloggers, or at least, to some of us; blogging about books is a way to share our love of reading with others all over the world. I fell in love with book blogging because I had no one who felt the same way I do about books near me. Discovering the Book Blogging Community, to me, has been a life changing experience. Without it, I wouldn't know all I know now about the YA Book-world and its authors, I wouldn't have bloggish friends and I wouldn't be in touch -and wouldn't have built a friendly relationship- with my favourite authors.
I blog because I love it. I love sharing my passion for books with the world, and I'm not afraid to say it for fear of being catalogued Nerd or Bookwork or something worse. I squeal in bookstores when I see a book that I didn't know had been published in my country, and I don't care if anyone's around to watch me, but I will do a happy dance.
I don't blog to be Internet Famous, I don't even care about my follower count (but I do love all of my followers!), and I certainly am not after free books or swag. When I started blogging, I didn't even know you could get free books. And considering I'm an international blogger, I still don't get any. I may have gotten three books for review last year. Whenever I get a request to review a book, I get excited and honoured to have been taken into consideration by the author/publisher. Because it tells me I must be doing something right. It tells me that the time I spend reading, and blogging and writing is worth it. People actually hear what I have to say.
People hear what you have to say. You don't have to be scared or feel sad because you don't have many followers and your post won't be read by many. If it's read by just one person, feel happy about it. I do.
And about blogs being a tool for Authors to promote their books, that's exactly what they are to them! We give their books free publicity in exchange for nothing. But it's also a way for us to connect, let them know we love what they're doing, learn what they're up to, etc. etc. etc.
A blog can sell a book, four books, a dozen, but it doesn't matter, and it shouldn't be our primary goal. Let the publicists/agents/booksellers/publishers do that instead. Let us spread our love for the book. It's like a contagious disease: I love it, tell you to buy it; you buy it, tell someone else to buy it; and so on and on forever.
Why do YOU blog?
xo,
Ella
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I'm participating in the Story Siren's Debut Author Challenge. The guidelines are below:
oooh! This is the first I've heard of it, but I'm all over it. Yes, I'll be taking the challenge!
Just signed up! I've read so many debuts this year I'm hoping it won't be hard to keep with it. ;)
Terry and Tere (fun to see your names together), so glad you're signing up. I ended up reading many more than the required twelve. Looking forward to seeing what you read!