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 account for years, to the point that a few years ago I was one of the top fifty reviewers in Canada (back when I reviewed Young Adult books exclusively).
I have over one hundred friends on the platform, coupled with over one hundred followers. I spend time posting updates and cultivating lists. When I review books that are mentioned in my blog posts I link back to my blog, which has improved my blog’s traffic. This channel is such an important one for book blogging and in my view is essential to be doing if you want any success in the field.
The channel in which I receive the most traffic to my blog is actually Twitter.
For many years I used Twitter to read peoples Tweets which I would occasionally re-tweet and/or like, but since I’ve been blogging I will Tweet out my latest blog posts and make sure to mention the handle of the author or authors relevant to the post. Here is a very successful example…
Due to tagging these authors, and thanks to them sharing it to their followers through likes and retweets my total impressions and engagements are much higher than an average tweet of mine. This post, If You Liked This NA Book You will Love This NA Book has done really well.
Finally, I put some energy into using NA Facebook groups.
Here are just some of the Facebook groups I am apart of, all of these are groups started by NA authors themselves and are then monitored by their assistants or fans they have hired as moderators of the groups. The group on the top of the list, Karina Halle’s (Anti)Heroes is a group I post regularly in including a post which plugged an author spotlight I did on Karina. That blog post is one of my most successful to this day, and I got such great reception on it in the comments on the Facebook post.
I have made my choices to not put my energy into Instagram or into Tumblr. In the case of Tumblr, I feel as if I outgrew the channel as there is a platform there for YA books, but not as much so for NA books. When it comes to Instagram I just cannot compete with the pretty photos due to reading most of my books as e-copies and my iPhone camera deciding it is just not going to focus on anything ever again.
