WE HAVE SURVIVED A YEAR FULL OF ASSASSINS, MURDERS, THEIFs, UNCOUNTABLE INJURIES AND BROKEN HEARTS (at least fictional ones).
That's right reader exactly a year today I posted my first review, and since then it has been a wonderful ride.
It has been packed with amazing books, (an ones I wish I had spent so long reading), so many wonderful packages full of books (as well as agonising waits for the postman), I can't count the number of times I have re-arranged by bookshelf or the hours I have spent trying to get a 'good' photo of my latest book or agonising over the best way to express my feels on a book.
It has all been worth it.
My, Oh, My, How Much The Blog Has Changed
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| We aren't perfect yet, but we are different! |
I look back at July last year and wow, I didn't realize how much of a change the blog has gone though in the last 12 months. There are three major things that I think have changed;
1) My reviews are much longer now. I don't know if think this is a good thing or not (I try not to make them TOO long so you don't feel like you are reading an essay!) but back when I started I wrote reviews which were generally less than 200 words, since then I have gradually been writing longer reviews and some have grown to 900 words!
2) My content has become more diverse. Originally -for about the first 3 months - I focused almost exclusively on writing reviews, but in October 2015 I started joining in this memes such as Top Ten Tuesday and Waiting on Wednesday. Since then I have continued to participate in these memes as well as creating my own features such as Show Me The Books and Review Collections.
3) Interactions with others have increased. When I originally started to blog I only focussed on writing my reviews, but as time went on I started to want to interact with people. So, I joined in with twitter chats (oh man, I had now clue how chaotic but amazing they were going to be), began to read and comment on other peoples blogs (and learnt a lot from those wonderful blog about how I waned my blog to look/work) and I can still remember how excited when I got my first 'consistent commenter' who didn't just comment once but cared enough to stay around and comment on several posts.
What We Have Been Up To
Number of Posts: 187
Number of Book Reviews: 50
Most Viewed Post: Waiting on Wednesday #9 - The Crown's Game
Most Viewed Book Review: Gifted (The Hayven #1) by J.A. George
Most Viewed Series Review: My Pack by Lane Whitt
Most Commented on Post: 2016 Love-a-Thon: Get to Know Me Questionnaire
Most Commented on Reviews: Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye || An Ember in the Ashes (#1) by Sabaa Tahir || Queen of the Tearling (#1) by Erika Johansen || Vengeance Road by Erin Bowman
Memorable Moments
Every physical ARC has been a memorable moment of there own, as a small blog getting physical ARC's isn't something I thought I would get. In the last few months I have got a few, my first few came through bookbridgr and more recently directly from the publishers! I could barely contain by excitement when the postman handed me each of these packages!!
My first #FairyChat (the twitter chat hosted by @FairyLoot), it was during the last few hours of a horrible car journey, I was on my mobile with patchy signal, so I am surprised I manage to join in at all, but I had a great time chatting with my fellow bookworms and I also won a my first twitter giveaway!
Fighting with code! Now, I get on fine with my computer I generally can make it do what I want it to, but you see that black dropdown menu bar at the top of my blog? That took hours of questioning and cursing my computer to get it to work right ( I am not a coder and it just wouldn't 'play ball').
And so many more, like the first time an author asked me to review their book, the first time an author thanked me for a review and shared it on facebook and twitter, the first time a 'big' blogger visited my blog or talked to me on twitter....I could keep going but I think I would bore you so I won't.
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