Why Do YOU Blog?

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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A thought on YA Lit

This morning (morning for me :p) I was going through my list of the blogs I follow and came across a title that called my attention. It was a post @ The Story Siren, of one of my favourite book blogs out there, that was named "The Dark Side (of Blogging)". So I read it. And couldn't believe what it said.

Someone had had the brilliant idea of sending Kristi a hate mail, telling her she was a bit old to be reading YA, and that she was getting a lot of books, which she shouldn't cause she already had so many, so please, "save some for the rest of us". And that she had to stop blogging and give teen bloggers a chance at getting heard.

Um, hello. I am a teen, I'm 17, and I can guarantee that I get heard. If I want to I can make anyone hear me. Another thing, I love YA Lit, and I don't think I'll stop reading it in a few years, when I'm 30, or 46. If I like a genre, I'll read it. Period.

Like Maggie Stiefvater said on her blog today:

• There's no "this is right for this age." "this is wrong for this age."
• There's this: "This book is right for me." "This book isn't my thing."

They're saying this all started cause Kristi posted a negative review on her blog. I'm assuming "Lena" (hate mail-er) is a friend/supporter of the author's work.

Scrolling down on her blog, I realized she had 220 comments (so far), and that not all of them were nice and supportive.

This comment really stroke me:

"This is not Lena. We are the ones that sent the letter. You all are just desperate to put a label so you assume that this is Lena when it is not.

Story Siren is a selfish, greedy bitch that shouldn't review books. She doesn't know anything about young adult books and her reviews are a failure. Teen bloggers deserve YA books more than she does. Publishers are idiots for sending books to her when the majority of the people that read the books are teenagers.

She is also very petty to put that post up just to get people to defend her. Her review on Immortal is incorrect and she is purposely giving bad reviews because she knows that all her dumb followers will listen to her and not read the book."

Look at that last sentence, saying Kristi's review on Immortal was incorrect. This tells me that I'm right assuming "Lena" is what I said earlier.

You want to know what I think of this? I think these "Anons" (if you had a bit of decency you'd comment with your name, or at least a fake one) have nothing -nothing- better to do, and I'm sure they wanted to draw so much attention to themselves like they are doing, so that this could become a Book Blogging Battle between Kristi's Army and The Anons.

So, I'm not going to pay anymore attention to these people.
Kristi, you shouldn't either. You rock. Period.

Love,

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