October 1, 2010 / Leslie

Friday Finds / Book Blog Hop ~ October 1st – 4th

The Book Blogger Hop, a weekly event hosted by Jen at Crazy For Books, is a place just for book bloggers and readers to connect and share our love of the written word!

Post about the Hop on your blog. Spread the word about the book party! The Hop lasts Friday through Monday. If you don’t have time to Hop today, come back later and join the fun! Each week there is a new discussion question for your post. This week’s question is:

“How do you spread the word about your blog?”

I originally started this blog to have a place to put my book reviews. I had joined LibraryThing and goodreads but I also wanted my own site. I noticed other book lovers were doing the same thing. Somewhere along the way I learned about Book Blogs. After I joined that group I found out about the many forms of networking.

One of the best ways to network is to visit, read and comment on other blogs. I find that if I leave a comment or question on a post that I am genuinely interested in, most bloggers will return the visit. I don’t always comment because sometimes I don’t have anything relevant to say; but if I like the blog I’ll be back. Another way was to join Book Blogs and network with other bloggers and join in on blogger events. Book Blogs is also a place for me to obtain ARCs from publishers, sign up host to giveaways, and link up my reviews. I also promote my reviews and giveaways on twitter and I participate in a few weekly memes.

I read about one book a week and post several times a week. I try to post consistently so that readers will return for new content and eventually traffic to the blog will build.

What great books did you hear about/discover this past week? Share your FRIDAY FINDS! This weekly event is hosted by Should Be Reading.

A new novel by Fay Weldon caught my eye. If you’ve never read one of her books and you’re looking for something a little out of the ordinary, give her a try.

Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon
As a preface, Weldon writes: “Two years after I was born, my mother had a miscarriage. Had she not, I would have grown up with a younger sister. This is the sister’s story, set in an alternative universe which closely mirrors our own.” A sobering thought, since this is a darkly dystopian portrait of 2013 England, a country where the downhill slide began with “The Shock in 2008, and after that the Crunch, and the Crisis, and the phoney Recovery, like the phoney war–and then the Squeeze and Inflation and now the Bite….”