An Insider’s Guide to The Blogger Girls
Hi, everyone! We’re from the review site,
The Blogger Girls (TBG), and we’ve come on RJ Scott’s blog today to talk a little about our own blog. We posted our first review on January 1, 2014, so we've only been around for a little over 8 months. TBG is made up of four main reviewers (Heather C, JustJen, Nikyta & Susan65) and a few guest reviewers (Ami, Candace, Gyn, Karen, Morgan, Tina & Trish) and we will basically review just about anything that catches our interest.
When we say anything, we literally mean ANYTHING. When the four of us came up with the idea to start our own blog, we wanted to be free to review whatever we wanted. While we all initially bonded over M/M books, each of us still review M/F when the urge strikes (like with Heather right now who's on a M/F Steampunk kick!) so with our site, we have no issues with reviewing M/F, M/M, F/F and… well, any other pairing out there! If one of us are interested, we’ll read the book and provide a review.
To be honest, none of us had really blogged before we started our site. Sure, we’ve reviewed for a few other sites in the past, but none of us really had experience in running our own blog. It took a lot of trial and error to really get things to where they are now. Every week it seemed like we wanted to add this new feature to the site or start this new trend to make things interesting or even just to add a picture to every post that is distinctive to ‘us’. It took a while before we finally found a rhythm to our blogging, something that we all liked and agreed on, and that was easy to remember to do… since most of us have horrible memories! LOL
We are pleased to say that we’ve reached a point where we are all happy and proud of the blog.
We blog because we love to review. We love to interact with writers and readers. We love discovering debut authors and their amazing books. We love bringing attention to older books and authors who have been around the block for years. We love getting those comments from readers that say “Your review made me read this book and it was AWESOME!”
We have a pretty good following and have a good amount of views for our posts per day. Like Heather’s review of
In These Words, Vol 1 by TogaQ & Kichiku Neko, JustJen’s review of
Confessions of a Gay Rugby Player 4 by Patrick Darcy, Nikyta’s review of
Written In Red by Anne Bishop, and Susan65’s review of
Hell & High Water by Charlie Cochet. These are our four highest viewed reviews ranging from 140 to 461 views.
It’s not easy to do, and without the four of us contributing, we wouldn’t be able to make
The Blogger Girls such an active blog. All of us have full time jobs, we have lives outside of reading and sometimes we don’t always have the time to read and review, we don’t have the time to create the guest posts but between the four of us, there’s always someone there to pick up the slack. We are a team, and while sometimes blogging can be frustrating (especially when WordPress decides to update their system! Grrrr) and sometimes we come across an author who’s a bit difficult to deal with, we do it because we want to, and we know that out there somewhere, we’ve got an audience that is looking forward to what we have coming up next.
Speaking of what we have coming up next, every day we have an author who stops by our site to talk about themselves, their books or about GRL. We have a different Theme Week and Author Week every month where we like to dedicate a cluster of reviews to either a certain theme or an author. In fact, August Theme Week is Mobster Week which is currently happening right now (Aug, 3 – Aug. 9). We have a lot of fun with those, because we usually find some hidden gems that were forgotten or passed over. We are also trying to expand more into M/F and F/F (most of our reviews are M/M related) so we’ve been reviewing more and more of those (or trying to at least!) and we’ve just recently decided to review audio books. We’ve got multiple author hosted giveaways a week and some freebie stories that we consider
Special Treats. We like to think we’ve got something for everyone!
We are still newbies, though, as we have a lot to learn and are in no way experts in blogging. We’ve reviewed thousands of books collectively but we adore our blog. It fits us as individuals and as friends. We are equal owners, and we love having so many authors coming on our blogs. We love chatting with readers AND authors so come on over to
The Blogger Girls, check out our site to see what type of reviews we offer and what type of promotional events we have. Feel free to chat with us outside the blog, too, because we are all over the web on
Facebook,
Twitter and
Tumblr.
We’d love to hear from you, whether you’re a reader, an author or even a publisher. Drop us a line whenever you feel like it :) We’ve got links on our main page that you can use to contact us, request a review, see what books will be reviewed soon and even check out our calendar to see which authors will be on our blog for that month.
Now! Since you’ve oh so graciously stuck around through that loooooooong post, we’ve decided to host a giveaway! We’re offering up a chance to win a $20 Gift Card to Amazon.com! All you have to do is enter the Rafflecopter giveaway and you’re set! This giveaway ends on Friday, August 15, 2014 at 11:59 p.m.
Rafflecopter Giveaway
