Armchair BEA Archives - Introverted Reader

Ask the Experts: Armchair BEA

It's the last day of Armchair BEA! It's been great to "meet" so many new-to-me bloggers this week. Thanks to all who have stopped by! Today's topic: "If you have any burning questions for your fellow participants about book blogging now is the time to ask and if you don't we'd love for you to share your own personal tips about book blogging!" My burning question: How do you make time for everything? This is aimed at the people with similar situations to mine--40 hour work week, family commitments, gym time, reading time, blogging time, and the list goes on. How do you do it? It seems like it gets harder rather than easier for me. And I don't even have children! My tips? I won't claim to be any kind of expert, but I can probably throw out a couple. 1. Keep it fun. Don't worry about how many followers you have or how many review books you get. You probably started doing this because it sounded like fun. Do whatever it takes to keep it that way. 2. Don't lose sight of what's really important in life. Make time for your real-world commitments. Most of us are blessed to have some sort of support system outside the internet. Keep up with them. The internet is always here. Your friends might not be if you lose touch with them. Stop by and see what advice other experts have to offer and give advice of your own at the Armchair BEA website! I have an affiliate relationship with Malaprop's, my local independent bookstore located in beautiful downtown Asheville, NC; and Better World Books. I will receive a small commission at no cost to you if you purchase books through links on my site.

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June 8, 2012

Bookish Miscellany

Positive Real-Life Bookish Experiences: Armchair BEA

The amazing organizers over at Armchair BEA are asking us to share positive real-life bookish experiences today. Where to start? Since I've been blogging, I've taken a much more active interest in my local independent bookstore (Malaprops in beautiful downtown Asheville, NC) and all the author events they have going on. We get some very well-known authors for a town our size! Some of my favorites have been Sarah Addison Allen, Joshilyn Jackson, Charles Vess, and John Connolly (whom I was apparently too lazy to write about). Through other book bloggers, I learned about the Decatur Book Festival and attended the past two years. It is such a great opportunity to meet authors and other bibliophiles! I highly recommend going if you can. But I'll write about something a little different. I've been on GoodReads a couple of years longer than I've been blogging. I "met" Sonya on there and befriended her, and was thrilled to find out that she was from a little town just over the mountain from my own. We shared book recommendations and tips about what was going on within our own local literary community. In January of this year, we decided it was finally time to meet face-to-face. I was a little nervous, and I think she was too. What if this other person was a serial killer or something? But we were meeting at a place we both love (You have to love a place called The Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar. Books and champagne. Throw in some chocolate and you have my idea of heaven. The best chocolate you will ever taste is just a street over.) It was like meeting an old friend. We talked and laughed over a bottle of wine like we had known each other for years.…

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June 6, 2012

Book Reviews

2012 Mid(ish)-Year Review: Armchair BEA

Today is giveaway day at Armchair BEA, so make sure you head on over and try to win some free books and other goodies! Those of us not sponsoring a giveaway are asked to write about our favorite books of 2012. I rarely accept books for review because I have discovered that I hate reading on a deadline, so I mostly read from my own shelves or from my local library. So when I say "My favorite books of 2012," that means books that I read in 2012. I don't think I've read any that were published this year. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King was fantastic. I do enjoy King's work, so I liked reading "behind the scenes" of some of his stories. I can't say that I've read any other writing manuals, but King's advice seemed to be pretty straightforward and simple enough to follow. Says the non-writer. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese is a great big story like I rarely take the time to read any more. I loved getting lost in Ethiopia. Verghese brought the sounds and smells of the country to life for me. I re-read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee in April and I loved it just as much this time around. I came away with a new appreciation for Jem. Don't you love how you get something different from a book every time you read it? I haven't written a review yet, but I was surprised by how much I loved Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. My aunt finally talked me into reading it by promising to do a read-along with me and I had so much fun texting with her about it! My emotions about Rhett and especially Scarlett were all over the…

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June 5, 2012

Personal Stories

Getting to Know All About You: Armchair BEA

Book Expo America is taking place this week in New York, so you know what that means for us bloggers left at home--it's Armchair BEA time! We're kicking the week off with "interviews." Each blogger is choosing from a list of ten questions and posting the answers on his or her own blog. If you want to read more about your [...]

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June 4, 2012

Blog Advice

Why You Should Think About Joining Twitter: Armchair BEA

There is a Book Blogger Convention going on today at Book Expo America and I am at least as jealous of the attendees of this event as I am of those grabbing ARCs and meeting authors. Look at these topics they'll be learning about: Marketing - How to increase your blog stats, Branding, Getting your name out there Writing and Building Content - Tips and tricks on writing good book reviews, Tone-humor sarcasm, I'm out of ideas what do I do now?/How do I keep it fresh?, Planning a good feature/series, What content is most popular? How do I innovate/differentiate?, How do I balance reviews with other content? Impact of the Relationship Between Author and Blogger - Creating/Fostering a relationship, Pitfalls of relationships between blogger/author Blogging With Social Responsibility I need help with all of these! Just because we can't be there in person doesn't mean that we can't learn from each other. So head on over to Armchair BEA and join in our virtual Book Blogger Convention Roundtable. I've struggled with this post. I felt like I didn't have anything to say about any of these topics and everything to learn. Then I participated in the #armchairBEA Twitter party last night and it hit me: I could blog about why you as a blogger should consider signing up for Twitter. I'm a recent Twitter convert myself. I only signed up a couple of months ago. Before I signed up, I just thought it was a place where people said stuff like, "I'm going to brush my teeth," or maybe the slightly more exciting, "Having a glass of wine." I was so wrong! Do those tweets come through? Sure. We all tweet them occasionally. But really it's a place to interact in real time with your fellow bloggers and readers,…

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May 28, 2010

Introverted Reader Features

The Importance of Character: Armchair BEA

With today being the day I host my Character Connection meme, the importance of character started to churn around in my head as I stared at my blank blog post page, desperately trying to think of something to post for Armchair BEA. Like everyone, there are innumerable things that determine whether I enjoy a book, some I'm probably not even aware of. Something that will always make or break a book for me, and that will inevitably come up in my review, is how real the characters felt. Historical people, fictional people, fantastical beings, anthropomorphized animals, sentient machines, it doesn't matter. I want to know them. I want to know where they came from, I want to know where they're going, I want to laugh with them, I want to cry with them, I want to love them. I want them to work themselves into my head and/or my heart and lodge there. I want authors to make me feel that. Give me characters I'm indifferent to and I will probably be indifferent to your book. Give me a character that becomes a friend and I will love her forever and sing her praises wherever I go. I don't know if that makes me a shallow reader, a weird reader, or a typical reader, but that's how I work. The good guys are easy. I'm not a writer, so I don't know how easy they are to write, but do it correctly, and the good guys are usually easy to love. Is there anything worse than when you actually dislike the hero? That's a book I'll probably give up on. What about despicable characters? That's a tricky one. I think there's an inverse ratio there: the more I hate one character, the more I need to love another one. All…

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May 27, 2010

Blogger Spotlight

Interview with Charlotte’s Library: Armchair BEA

As part of the ongoing Armchair BEA festivites, I had the pleasure of interviewing Charlotte's Library. I love the answers she gave to my questions, so please read on, even if your reading taste isn't similar! Can you please tell my readers a little about your blog? My blog is somewhat specialized--I generally review science fiction and fantasy (sff) for children and teenagers, with a smattering of other children's books. About three times a month I publish lists, with blurbs, of the new sff releases for kids and teens. Every Sunday I do a roundup of middle-grade sff reviews and news from around the blogging world, and on Tuesdays I try to review time travel stories. I saw your TimeSlip Tuesday feature and it sounds interesting. Which book(s) got you interested in time travel? I've loved time travel stories for as long as I can remember. Some of my favorites from when I was young are The Story of the Amulet by E. Nesbit, The Ghosts by Antonia Barber, and Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer. Have you ever been or do you think you'll ever go to BEA? I've never been to BEA, and I'd like to go someday. I did get to go to ALA Midwinter last January,and found it tremendously exciting to rush from booth to booth seeing what ARCs were on offer. That was a much smaller affair, of course, than BEA, which might be too much for me, what with meeting authors and all. I would probably end up hiding in a corner, surrounded by more ARCs than I could carry....But I would like to go next year! I would have gone this year, but my husband got his way paid to go to Ireland to play music at a prestigious event. That was a once-in-a-lifetime…

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May 26, 2010