As you might have noticed, I ran something of an experiment for the month of February. I posted a new YA review to my website every weekday for four weeks, and made sure to announce the fact on my Livejournal, my Facebook, and my website news page. I tried several different styles of review, covered a wide range of material and a few different genres. I know I had fun. But what about you?
That’s right, it’s the audience feedback portion of the evening. For all my efforts, I saw almost no response from the peanut gallery, in terms of replies, comments, additional readers, or flaming bags of poo. So what did people think of this? What did you like, what did you not like? What would you like to see more of? (I’ve had one request for top ten lists and reading suggestions, and that’s in the works.) Should I cross-post the full reviews to my LJ and FB, or was posting them on my site enough? Do I need more pictures? More contests? Funnier reviews? Longer reviews? Contests? Twitter? Or should I shut up and go away, no one cares?
(And how DO those other bloggers do it, with the comments and the readers and the activity?)
It will be a while before I can do something like FebruarYAY! again, simply because it does take time to build up that many extra reviews. Most of what I cover is already earmarked for other venues, and only appears on my site when it’s being archive. But still, with the way I read and review, there’s nothing preventing me from doing something else down the road….
Now’s your chance to let me have it with your thoughts. I’m interested in what the audience has to say. Thanks.
Ok, a quick feedback for you and FebruarYay. Although it is more of a ‘yay, but…’ in my case.
What I notice is that your style of review is very classic, i.e. it’s the same feel as you’d get it in a print environment like in a magazine.
For one thing, you do not make use of the break option, i.e. ‘more after the break’, which results in walls of text, which, at least to my eye, is not as pleasing, especially when I want to browse through entries, I have to click through too many pages.
Next…I have to read the whole review to find out if that book’s a good one or not. Why would I read a review about a bad book unless I’d be interested in the author or the topic and curious why you don’t like it? I usually browse reviews to find books I like. So…a little grading system would be nice, preferably that tells me with one look if it is the next best thing to sliced bread or just a good read if you don’t have anything else on hand.
Pictures…uhhhh…unless it is necessary for the review…no. That is if you review books. For a convention, yes, more pictures, but I never saw you doing that.
Cross-posting is tedious and has the problem that you have to edit your posts EVERYWHERE if you want to update something or just change this one embarrassing typo that snuck past the spellchecker…
Twitter to announce new reviews in addition to your RSS feed is not a bad idea, as with all Web 2.0 stuff though it has to be used. If you don’t tweet on a regular basis, chances are you loose followers again. Are you communicative enough for that? Do you want to be?
Contests…I would be in favor of, I always need more books…but I guess my wife would not be too fond of that idea…and you’d likely mutter something about international shipping so…no 😛