When I look at where community guidelines within the NA community, most blogs do not have a set of rules. Where strict community guidelines come into play is in the Facebook groups set up by Authors and monitored by their assistants and others hired to monitor the groups. My own set of community guidelines is inspired by these groups as the audience for these groups will be quite similar to those reading my blog. Here are my community guidelines: Be nice and be respectful. Treat others the way you would want to be treated. This is the ultimate rule No bashing of authors, and books. This blog is supposed to…

This week centred around the use of transmedia integration and channels. It is the nature of book blogging to be on multiple platforms, pushing out content on multiple platforms. Besides maintaining blogs many book bloggers maintain their Goodreads account, post beautiful #bookstagrams on Instagram, push affiliate links and promotion graphics through tweets, reblog fandom related posts on Tumblr, and communicate with other book bloggers in communities on Facebook. This is a lot, that is why the most prolific reviewers, review full time. While many others pick and choose what tasks above to do in order to balance the rest of their life with book blogging. I have been maintaining a Goodreads…

I have really enjoyed diving into my analytics. I decided to look at my blog on a large scale and I’ve looked all the way back to when the class started. I’m diving into both my acquisition and behaviour statistics and using those to determine the conversion I should set. Let’s start with Acquisition… My blog tends to acquire an audience from social media. This comes as no surprise to me as I have been actively using social media to recruit an audience. When you dive deeper into Social, my traffic appears to be only coming from Twitter. This also makes sense to me as I have been more active on Twitter…

After discussions that occurred this week, I decided to look into other ways to monetize my site. I made the choice to become an Amazon Associate. This means I can now get Amazon affiliate links, and I went this route because I am reviewing books that will primarily be bought on Amazon so why not place my monetization there rather than in banner ads that will distract from my content. When Monique spoke in class about her personal book review blog and how she uses affiliate links on it, it inspired me to test run them on mine.   I also tried my hand at creating an advertisement. I actually…

Through discussion both in lecture and tutorial surrounding copyright and attribution, it got me thinking about just how much other people’s work benefits my blog. I have had people compliment me on my widgets and sidebars believe that I have some vast knowledge of code and have done them myself. In reality, most of my fanciest widgets were made on Goodreads. Goodreads actually has a page that builds widgets for your blogs and lets you customize them to your heart’s content. The other big contribution to my blog is all the banner and promotion graphics I get sent from the PR companies I work for. Someone at that PR company…

After discussion from tutorial, whether or not to monetize is on my mind. I am torn between whether or not I should run ads on my blog. On one hand, a little extra money never hurt anyone. I remember from my short stint on YouTube how satisfying it was to earn the 10 cents that I did (I have never received a cheque though, you need to make at least a dollar for that). I am a Starbucks barista and I live in one of the most expensive places to live in the world. As someone who consumed other blogs for years, I reaped the benefits of the blogs that I read did…

This week’s prompt asks us to discuss our imagined audience… I want this blog to be a resource for all readers of NA. It does not matter if you are new to the genre or have been reading it for decades, there is something gain from reading my reviews. I have geared my design towards showcasing my Goodreads as I view my audience as dedicated readers who will have accounts on such a site. I have also geared my design towards helping authors with promotion, which is a huge element of NA blogging, through my contact information and my qualifications from working with Netgalley and InkSlingerPR being very clear on…

This week’s prompt has us critiquing the design elements of a site we frequent. I thought I would examine the blog that inspired me to start my own… Aestas Book Blog Mauve Pagé highlighted the basic design principles as Balance, Rhythm, Proportion/Scale, Contrast/Point of Focus, and Unity. Balance: Aestas’ blog is very symmetrical, as the middle menu bar featuring specific book covers is even, three on each side. Her title/logo is also centred. This symmetry is very pleasing to me, I really like that feature of the design. Rhythm: Aestas uses consistent typefaces throughout her blog. She has the colour palette of black, white, and beige that she doesn’t stray from. She cannot have a more colour…

This past week’s lecture made me think more about genres. The question “are genres created?” was posed to the class. It got me thinking about my process of categorizing books into genres. I have always been the type of reader who would rather classify something under a specific sub-genre than use the broad main genre terms. I barely ever refer to a book as a fantasy novel. I stress whether that book is urban fantasy or high fantasy because both sub-genres are such different and distinct reading experiences. Another case that comes up for me is actually putting certain books into a genre was so difficult I started calling them an amalgamation of…

These past few weeks from talking to a stranger and from reading John Suler’s The Online Disinhibition Effect, I have thought more about the variations within myself in public and online. Out of everything discussed in the article I found the concept of Minimizing Authority the most prevalent to my online self. Here’s why…   July 10th, 2012 was the first time I interacted with a favourite author on a social platform (in this case Twitter).   Since then I have had authors like, favourite, retweet, and follow me on Twitter. On Instagram, I have received likes from them too. If you were to check my Goodreads friends list you would also see…