Of books, writing, and life in general
I have stopped using Feedburner for my RSS feed and email subscriptions.
If you’re subscribed to this blog via email, you don’t have to do anything from your end! You will simply notice a change in how new posts are being delivered to your inbox and in the appearance of the emails themselves. I am now using Mailchimp’s RSS-to-email service and it’s configured to look for new posts thrice a week and will send email updates ONLY when there are new posts.
One thing I really love about my job is that I discover a lot of creative campaigns and projects from around the world. I got another one for yah!
Remember back in September when I posted about Heineken’s Legends campaign? That campaign was all about finding out whether legends are born or made. They dropped off random guys in random parts of the world to find out what they’re made of when taken out of their comfort zone. I thought that was pretty cool, especially when they dropped off two Irish dudes on a beach in the Philippines! Lucky dudes.
I’m winning the boring blogger award these days and I don’t really have time to sit down and work on new and personal posts to get my blog going again like the good old days (I feel old), so for today I’m just going to ramble about some bookish stuff! Yay.
I am super delayed on my reviews. I still have about 30 books from authors and publicists from last year and I don’t think I’ll be able to get through all of them this year. GAH. I bit off more than I can chew last year and I’ve stopped accepting new books (unless they were sequels of something I reviewed before), but I still have so many books to go through. I’m getting through them but it’s been slow. Gah.
Even though I already have tons on my review pile and tons of personally-chosen unread books on Kindle and iBooks, I still keep downloading free Kindle books that catch my fancy on Amazon’s Top 100 free lists. I just can’t help it. It’s an addiction.
It’s a love-hate and hit-or-miss thing with me when it comes to romance novels, but sometimes, when I’m in a mood, I pick out a free romance book just for kicks. I’m not a fan of most new romance novels these days, but sometimes I just feel like reading something cliche and exaggerated or ridiculously sappy or just plain eye-roll worthy. Sometimes I just want something light and not so cerebral. Heh.
That’s it. Heh.
Do you have any bookish confessions you’d like to share?
So the question that’s been on my mind lately is this: Am I still a book blogger if I haven’t been reading or reviewing any of the books I’m supposed to be reading and reviewing?
Last Friday I was all, “Have a good weekend, people. Read a book.” on Twitter and all weekend I was having a hard time getting back to the book I’ve been “currently reading” for weeks now. And it’s a pretty exciting book, too, with a really kickass female heroine, and I was having a hard time getting back to it. I finished it finally at the last hour. Yay for me, but then I still have tons of books to go.
I’m kind of stuck. And I suck because I’m kind of stuck.
When I first started book blogging I was fortunate enough to be hired as an assistant at an author PR and marketing firm. Later on I worked with the author who was my manager from that company. These days I just help her out with stuff as needed.
In my work as an assistant, I often have to do a lot of hopping from one book blog to another. I know, it’s an awesome job. I spend a lot of time looking at blogs to find potential reviewers or to check if a blogger has put up a review or a feature post as agreed. I enjoy it because book blog hopping not only lets me in on what’s happening in the community (what’s new, what’s trending, what are bloggers excited about these days, etc.), but it also helps me discover new blogs and gives me a chance to read about new or even old books.
For work purposes, I tend to zero in on a few things on a book blog. I get giddy when I see a nice design and a clean layout (I’m kind of obsessed with blog design), but those are not the only things that get my attention. Here are a few things that I usually look for in a book blog when I’m looking to connect with bloggers about an author or a book.
This is the story of my I’m-moving-to-WordPress adventure. It’s a bit long so you can actually skip through all the rambling and go straight to the mighty Rafflecopter! I say, woot.
After months and months of contemplating and research, I finally transferred this blog from Blogger to WordPress! All together now, YAYYYYYY. And I did it all by myself, too, because I’m a cheapskate and, well, I really wanted to learn to do it myself. I have more than one blog that I want to transfer so I figured I should learn all about it.
I used Grammarly to grammar check this post, because I wanted to pit myself against a robot, or in this case a program, and see if I would survive the robot apocalypse. Something like that.
Okay, not really. I was going to do a post about my favorite freelancer’s tools when I received an email about Grammarly, an automated online proofreader. According to the website, it ‘corrects contextual spelling mistakes, checks for more than 250 common grammar errors, enhances vocabulary usage, and provides citation suggestions.’
I was iffy about it at first but the Grammarly rep emphasized that the tool is meant to be a ‘second set of eyes’ to help people with their writing and not as a replacement for a human editor. Okay then. I figured I can at least do a quick test.
As a freelance writer I come across a lot of interesting things from tips, sources and websites I follow. Most of them are branding or marketing campaigns that are unlike anything I’ve seen and pretty much off the hook.
One of the latest cool things I’ve come across is Heineken’s Voyage campaign, where they try to find out what men are really made of when taken out of their regular lives and dropped off into the unknown. They find these random dudes from all over the world and then drop them off in a seemingly random location. Imagine getting dropped off in the middle of Alaska with nothing but a giant life-ring, a tuxedo and a plane ticket for home, and the airport is miles away. Holy legendary adventures, Batman!
As you can see, things are looking a little different here. I’m still fixing things up so please bear with me! Hopefully I’ll be all set soon. :)