With almost 25% of the countries in the world have imposed a lock down due to the Corona virus pandemic, staying in seems the only way to go. And that might be a bit too convenient for us bookworms, right? If you were one of those introverts, you would have preferred to stay in with a cuppa.
For others staying in might be hard and can quickly become too much. But when there is literally no other safe way to get away from it, why not make the best use of the downtime?
Things to do without leaving the house
So, let us talk about the things to do inside the house during the lock down time aka “don’t leave your house if you value it” time, shall we?
3. Try one of the virtual museum tours if you are into culture and art. Museums of Amsterdam, London,South Koreaand even the Vaticanat your fingertips.
4. Learn a new language or more realistically, learn to say hello in different languages. Duolingo might interest you!
5. Can you name all the countries in the world. Learn with the World Geography games site.
6. Now you got all the time, and there is no excuse to not do those at home workouts. Keep fit!
9. Bring out those board games and play with your family or friends, whoever is around.
Clean up around the house
1. Do a fashion show and try every one of your dress. Discard or donate anything that do not fit or “spark joy”, Marie Kondo style.
2. Clean up your media folder on your phone and PC. Delete those duplicates and let your phone breathe a bit.
3. Are you one of those oldies that still has music stored on your PC or even CDs? Welcome to 2020, clean that up! I bet Media Monkey is still going strong.
4. Match all your Tupperware lids to the containers. In addition, the desi version of this is pick all the polythene covers lying around the house and collect them in a huge one.
5. Make a budget and check your finance. We need to ride out this tough times!
6. Get your taxes done early this year! Even though the governments would probably move the deadlines to pay the taxes.
7. Also ,why not catch up on the 8 hours sleep or how much ever you want to finally?
8. Throw out your old and expired make up stuff and clean the vanity table.
Bookish things to do
1. Start by making a list of the books that you wanna read during the Corona virus shut down.
2. Write reviews on Goodreads for the books that you loved. Authors need you!
3. Clean up your Goodreads virtual shelves. Remove the ones that you no longer wish to read and remove duplicates.
4. And update your wishlist. Soon this will be over and you will be treating yourself with book hauls.
5. Pick up a classic that you have been dreading to start. Read 20 or 100 pages, as you choose, everyday and finish the mighty book. War and peace, anyone?
6. It is a good time to do those Bookstagram shoots that you have been postponing for a while.
7. Do a virtual book club meeting. Maybe with some chai. Or wine!
8. Join readathons and read with others to keep your mind distracted from everything else.
9. Finally, dust your book shelf, and those on your night stand, the coffee table, and pretty much everywhere else.
Tidy up your blog
1. Ensure your posts are all on brand. Do they follow the same color scheme and format?
2. Begin by cleaning up your tags and categories on your blog.
3. Next, add Alt text tag information to all the images in your posts.
4. Add a Pinterest sized image to all your posts, or at least the most visited ones.
5. In addition, once you have done adding one Pinterest image to the important posts, add one more Pinterest sized image to them and maybe hide them inside your post. Thank me when the traffic improves!
As many of us would agree, book review posts draw the least traffic and engagement in a book blog. Despite this notoriety, many of us don’t want to stop posting reviews as many of us including me started our book blogs initially to talk about the books we read and how we feel about them.
What makes a visitor comment on a post or not is not easy to understand. While it is not possible for us to satisfy and engage with every visitor, it is possible to tailor our review posts to suit their needs. And in the process, motivate them to create engagement and increase traffic.
Make the summary more interesting
Do you still copy the blurb/summary of the book from Goodreads or Amazon?
The plot summary is something that is usually placed on the top part of the review. When the readers come across something that they can read elsewhere, they tend to skim over them and lose connection with the post.
Skip the copy paste. Write the summary in your own words and keep it as short as you can. And that reminds me of something else.
Avoid including spoilers
One of the reasons that your visitor is skipping reading reviews on blogs is to avoid spoilers. Repeat visitors usually remember these bad experiences in a blog and may avoid their review posts altogether.
Make sure that you don’t spoil the reading experience for anyone else. And if at all, you can’t avoid a spoiler or two ensure they are hidden unless they are specifically clicked open.
Make your star rating stand out
The first thing most readers look at is a score or star rating when they visit a review post. So make sure your rating stands out from all your other texts. Explain why you rated the book as you did and obviously be fair in your rating.
Anyone with a blog can write a review. What makes yours different from the thousand others? YOU. People visit your blog and your review to know what YOU think about the book. They are not at a blog to get an impersonal, critique review. (But if you think that is what you want to do, please continue to do it with style.)
Try including your life and emotions into the review posts, just like you would in any other discussion or tag post. Be the fangirl that you are (or the snarky ray of sunshine as it might be), people like that kinda genuineness.
Improve the aesthetics
It is no secret that people love seeing beautiful and colorful things. Make your reviews pleasant to look at and maybe pepper in a few relevant GIFs just to hold in their attention.
It is often a criticism that bloggers are so focused on hyping up a book they like that they shy away from talking about the negatives in a book. This is especially true when they review a book they received from an author or publisher.
In my opinion, our duty as a blogger is first to the reader – to tell them what our honest views about the book. If you also share that opinion, please do share both the positives and negatives you may find in a book.
But be gentle and professional about your critique – say what worked for you and what didn’t. Remember you can be critical of the book, not the author.
End with a question or two
Another way to motivate your readers to comment is to pose questions at the end of your review. Ask both book specific questions, for people who have read the book already, and generic questions for others so that there will be something for all the readers to mull upon and answer.
Relate to other books
At the risk of annoying some readers when you get it wrong, comparing and relate the book you review with some other book or movie may help your reader to take a decision about the book.
More importantly, now the other Bridget Jones’ fans might be interested to comment on how true your comparison is..
Read popular books
When all else fails, people search for reviews of book that they read or want to read. Thus reviewing popular and trending books may improve your chances of engagement in book review posts.
You do not have to go out of your favorite genres to do this but reading popular ones in your genre is a good idea. And getting off your comfort zone may work for you as well.
What do you think makes a reader motivated to read and comment on your review? Or what do you as a reader would want in a book review to make it useful to make a decision? How to improve engagement in book review posts? Let us talk.
As many of us did, I started my blog to talk about the books I read aka book reviews. At some point, people in my real life could only take so much of my nerdiness and were glad that I found a place (where they weren’t required to be present) to do that.
That is why, despite what the statistics say and constant murmur about how “nobody reads book reviews”, I can’t give up writing on book reviews on my blog. Yes I agree they bring fewer comments and likes, if at all, but it is something I do for myself – even if it has shifted being a rant review from the initial days to a more structured format now.
It is true that many book bloggers have reduced the frequency of posting book reviews. And a few have even stopped posting them altogether on their blogs and publish them on Goodreads instead. Well, that is never happening on Elgee Writes.
I am good at over-analyzing things and sometimes I do make sense. I have been wondering why book reviews don’t get engagement, despite the fact that just few years ago, that was all the book blogs were doing.
Why book reviews don’t get engagement, actually?
Why aren’t book reviews getting the attention they deserve? Especially considering they are one of the hardest type of posts to write on a book blog. Well, let me over-analyze that for you.
“I want review of *insert hyped book title*!”
The popularity of the book reviews is almost dependent on how popular the books you review are. But as a reader/reviewer, I can not always read books that are popular because
I may not have access to all the popular books due to geography and duh.. money.
I may not be interested in those books, bringing me to the next point.
“I don’t read historical romance!”
Every reader/blogger has a favorite genre of books. And not everyone will love to read all genres. I for one, read very few Science Fiction and fewer Fantasy books.
I am definitely losing on readers who are looking for reviews of Sci-fi/Fantasy books. For want of more readers, I don’t think I can spend time reading what I am not interested. I know that goes against everything blogging stands for, but sorry.
“Reviews are very subjective”
More often than not, book reviews in blogs talk about what WE THINK of the book, as blogs should be doing. We end up talking what WE liked in a book and what WE didn’t. We do not talk about what was good and bad in an objective manner, nor many of us aim to do that too.
Obviously, we like that kinda subjectivity and prefer to keep that way. So unless the reader shares our tastes and preferences in choosing books, they may choose to ignore our reviews and we can do nothing about it.
“Part three? I have not even read the first!!”
Trilogies are all the rage currently. And when you review a book that is part of a series, you have a fairly smaller audience because unless they have read the other books the readers may not be interested in yours at all.
Sometimes readers might hold out on reading your review until they read other parts so that they can avoid its influenced.
“Have I heard of this book?!”
If your reading tastes are anything like mine, your reviews will be books that very few people have heard of. My reading list rarely consists of popular books, though I am trying to change that and begun reading more Young Adults and romances last year.
So it goes without being said, those book reviews have fewer engagements. As a reader of “not so popular-yet” books, I have to take that chance.
“Reviews are not honest enough”
Of late there has been a shift in the review field, that bloggers are shying away or refraining from giving a negative or even a moderately critical review for any book.
Yes I understand why they decide to do that (saving their mind’s peace is one of the main reason) but still as a reader I might want to know what went wrong in the book by reading a review.
So when that doesn’t happen often they might tend to quickly dismiss reviews as mere promotion tool for the author.
“What to comment?!”
Many a times, readers are genuinely stumped, not knowing what to say. Unless your reviews stand out and make them want to talk about them, book reviews usually do not invoke much response. What could they say about your thoughts about a book they have not read yet?
I usually throw them a lifeline asking something generic at the end of my post so that it might help to comment, even without reading that particular book. But beyond that, there is nothing else I can do about it.
Can we make book reviews better?
On an average, I follow about 50+ book blogs on a regular basis and if each even posts one book review per week I read about 150 book reviews approximately each month. I am sure many bloggers do more than I do.
That makes it quite understandable that people skip commenting on book reviews, which let’s face it, are a drag compared to other posts like tags or discussions.
So it is on us as a blogger to make the reviews more engaging and interesting. I will post more on that in the coming weeks.
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Let us talk
Do you still post book reviews on your blog? Why do you think book reviews don’t get engagement at all? If you are a reader, let us know what do you expect from a review to make it more useful? Let us talk.
I love Pinterest. Not just for saving ideas or recipes to try out later, but also for my blog. I am not sure how much traffic that has generated for me yet but it definitely has.
Like everyone around here I caught with the Pinterest train when it came out. But I used it mostly for personal stuff like saving for holiday decor or a hairstyle that I wanted to try out for an occasion.
While I knew about group boards that worked well for so many bloggers, I was reluctant to join them because well I am majorly a book blogger and many of my posts are going to have a book cover as its feature image. That may not be so attractive to the other bloggers. So never joined them.
But then I joined some amazing group boards that are mainly for book bloggers and here I am pinning away to glory. If you are not following me yet on Pinterest, ensure you do right away.
Now that I have established I like Pinterest, though not as much as Twitter, I still hate having to navigate those atrociously huge images in a post. Especially when you have more than one Pinterest size image. There I said it.
For the uninitiated, the recommended Pinterest image size is 735px X 1102px according to Canva, which is definitely huge. I know some of us dislike seeing too many GIFs in blog posts but imagine having to see these humongous images.
What if I say you don’t have to see them at all? In fact all my posts have a pinnable image or two, but they are never visible when you scroll down the post. And it is definitely not difficult.
If you switch back to visual mode, the picture will blocked as below.
Save and publish the draft. You are good to go. Don’t worry, all the other images and GIFs will be still visible and can be pinned if you still want to.
You can still add the blog images from your site to Pinterest like you do usually.
Click Save from site on the Pinterest website and add your link there.
Either way you will find this Pinterest image ready to be pinned. And if you click on it, you will be directed to my post, like you would expect.
Now you will be able to share as many images as you want from your posts, but without pesky images bothering your readers.
(Psst.. There is a pinterest image hidden in this post as well. Just try clicking the pin button here)
Let me know if you tried this on your blog. Do you want to see these small yet handy solutions for your blog? Feel free to ask me if you have any doubts.
One of the perks of being a book blogger is the number of books that we receive for review. For a book lover, there could be nothing better. With the increasing number of books we receive for review between the e-galleys and the ones sent by the publishers and PR agents themselves, it is a miracle that we even have a social life, if at all we did.
So why would I respond to an unsolicited email from a never-heard-of self-published author requesting reviews for his books, leave alone review them?
Okay, that might have been harsh. But that is kinda the truth.
The only thing that we book bloggers love other than reading books is talking about them to other book-worms, a.k.a their blog readers. We are absolutely thankful for the review copies and the giveaways the authors and their publishers offer because let’s face it: otherwise, we would be broke AF.
Some of us are alive mostly for the books delivered in their inboxes (e-books) or on their doorsteps. Okay, that may have been a tad too grim, but let us not make it about me. But, you get it, we LOVE the freebies.
But again you have not seen our inbox and the number of emails we receive soliciting reviews in a week. I can only imagine the state of the popular bloggers out there. And to add to the issue, there are several blogs that do not accept indie books for reviews.
So if you are an indie or self-published author, who does not have an army of agents working on social media profile, promotions like book tours and seeking out reviews all over the world and the internet, it, sure, is all the more difficult to handle it all. Of course, this post is not to dampen your spirits but to help in some way or the other.
So how can you, as a newbie/self-published author, make your attempt to reach bloggers more successful? Read on what book bloggers want to tell you, authors, about book reviewing.
1) Get to know us
It is always better to over prepare than none at all. Please spend a few minutes on our blogs and try to get to know us. It always helps if you address us by our names or the handle (if you found us on social media) than a generic “dear blogger”. I am not asking you to read every post in the blog (even though I would totally love it if you do) but at least know if I am interested in the genre that you write about.
That brings up the second point.
2) Read the review policy
Most bloggers have a separate page detailing their policy and preferences; a few just mention them on the sidebars. It would hardly take a minute or two to read them. This might sound like a no-brainer but it would be surprising to know the number of people who skip this. It is not only silly that they won’t read it but I feel it is downright rude.
3) Do not pester
The policy page usually has the instructions on what to do further. Not all bloggers review all genres and they do not accept all the books they receive. Most of them will let you know if they accept to review your book. Do not send us your books before say YES. The policy page usually tells you about the expected turnaround for their reviews, if they accept. So wait for a while say, two weeks or so, before you follow-up. Follow up, not pester or antagonize them already.
4) Do not ask for more
Many book bloggers talk about the books out of love and passion. They do not owe you much. If they agree to a review, do not expect or demand more out of them. Even if you are paying for their services, make sure what they offer and agree to. Ask them where they would post and promote their review, and thus your book. Demanding them to post the review in too many places, asking them to tag you everywhere, etc can be too exasperating for them too.
5) Respect their views
Not everyone is going to like your work. Not everyone can fall in love with your characters. You are approaching strangers from the internet for an unbiased review. They might give a negative opinion; be prepared to accept it. Do not ask them to remove them, or demand them to not post them. Do not argue about their rating system or their scores. Most bloggers do not even expect to hear a ‘thank you’ from you after the review, much alone an argument with you. Respect their views, especially the one you sought for.
6) Avoid badmouthing
Of late, there have been quite a few instances where authors and bloggers got into a verbal feud. Of course, keyboard warfare is not new, but having badmouthing a particular blogger for their opinion is not okay at all. If you have a problem, be adults and discuss them privately, not on social media. I am sure the news travels and would hit you out of nowhere.
7) Help us help you
Lastly, provide us with all the required details to make a decision about reviewing your book. Once they agree to accept to review your book, you can provide them with Amazon and Goodreads links, and your social links to help to tag you once the review is up.
With the Amazon’s new restrictions, many bloggers are wary of being ‘friends’ with authors in the social media, lest making their reviews may be brought under scrutiny and may even be removed. So if they are not accepting your ‘friend’ requests, do not take it personally.
In short, be as polite as you would be when you meet a stranger. Do not let the anonymity presented by the internet spoil you. Do your research.
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Let us chat
If you are an author, let us know what’s your say? If you are a book blogger, link your review policy page here and let us know what else you wanna tell the authors that approach you.
