Musing Monday – Aug. 6

Monday. [sigh] Why does this keep on happening? Why don’t we just get rid of Mondays altogether? But then Tuesday would be the new Monday and that wouldn’t solve anything. But, today we have Musing Monday and that might make the day a little better. A very little.

Our question this week is: What attracts you to a book blog? What puts you off in a book blog? Do you share personal stuff on your book blog?

I’m attracted to book features and the number of reviews. I mainly go to book blogs to find new books to read, so such posts like ‘coming soon’ or ‘what I have my eye on’ are good for that. The Book Smugglers have a feature called ‘On the Smugglers’ Radar’ that lists books they’ve found lately that look good and I enjoy that. I get a lot of my to be read pile from posts like that. I like seeing a nice clean layout on a blog, with sane colors. I like medium sized posts. I might skim over a super long post and really short posts frustrate me because I don’t know why the author is even bothering. (A lot of the meme answer posts are like that. Two sentences is not a post and shows a distinct lack of interest and effort.)

Blogs with dark colors put me off. Your background should be white, or at least very pale, and your text should be black. Having a blog that has a black background and white text or, even worse, grey or some other color text will cause me to click away. Major eye strain trying to read that. Author interviews don’t really interest me. They are nice and all but I’m more attracted to the book itself than anything the author might have to say about it. I’m not a big fan of posts with ‘read more’ links. I’d rather see the whole post at once. I don’t have a lot of interest in personal posts in book blogs. I’m there for the books. An occasional post about something major happening in your life or like a monthly update type of thing would be fine. Otherwise your personal blog and you book blog should be mostly separate.

(I’ve been working the last few days on a new header for my blog and possibly a new background if I can get my art skills to line up with what’s in my head. I don’t know when I’ll be done. I’ll probably tweak it until the end of time, completely unsatisfied for some nameless reason I can’t pinpoint. I’m like that.)