The Blogger Recognition Award

Thank you so much Emily for nominating me! Emily blogs at That Weird Girl Life, and she has amazing posts from tips for small up and coming bloggers to music to mental health to everything in between. She has a little bit of everything!!!

Lauren over at Lala’s Book Reviews is your one stop shop for all things Y.A. books! From reviews, to book suggestions, new releases, and book tags (plus some bookish unboxing posts! Love those!), her blog is perfect for book lovers, whether you love Y.A. or not! (But you know you do!)

– Emily from That Weird Girl Life

About The Award

The Blogger Recognition Award is an award given to bloggers by bloggers. It aims to help bloggers’ get their work recognized by and promoted to other bloggers. As with any award, there are some rules for nominees:

• Thank the blogger who nominated you for the nomination and link to their blog.
• Write a blog post on your site displaying the award that describes why you started your blog
• Write two pieces of advice you have for new bloggers
• Nominate and notify 15 more bloggers

The Birth of My Blog:

Before 2018, I was never an “active” part of the book community because I didn’t have any social media. At that time, I got all of my bookish news from booktube, author pages, and book publishing companies’ blogs (like EpicReads). I honestly didn’t know that the blogging community in general is thriving like it is because I had honestly thought it was a thing of the past!

I had thought about book blogging a couple of times during high school, but never acted on that because a) I had no idea what I was doing and b) didn’t have anyway to promote it because I wasn’t allowed to have any social media accounts. Anyway, skip ahead to August 2018 a few weeks before I started my freshman year in college, and I was given the green light to create my Twitter account (and instagram later that same week – not sure if I’m going to talk about that right now, but we’ll see).

Once I got on Twitter and started following my favorite authors (,musicians, and youtubers), those accounts that are “recommended because you follow x, y, and z was started to show up on my page and authors would retweet reviews on different blogs. I was seeing active book bloggers and was surprised that so many people were still blogging (idk why I thought it was a dead community, maybe because I had spent so much time on YT). Anyway, I was starting to see that I had a voice, and I could express my love for books.

(Apparently I am going to talk about my bookstagram), about a week after creating my Twitter, I had started an instagram because there were giveaways on Twitter and you could get an extra entry if you had added that people on IG. When I first started my IG account, I wasn’t expecting it to become a bookstagram account. But some how, it morphed into one. At this time I still wasn’t blogging. I was seeing people post reviews, hauls, wrap-ups, etc. on IG, and I think this is what I was expecting to be the new blog (which it is in a way). During this time, I was posting a photo here and there, but I didn’t have a clear theme on my page, a large following, or realize how to take a good book photo and utilize the editing thing in the app.

Skip a head to October, I was seriously considering making a blog because I had see so many posts on twitter and bookstagram where people weren’t talking about many of the books I love. One thing led to another, and I started my blog on Wix at the end of October, so I could try and give these under appreciated books some love! During the rest of 2018, I was getting much traffic on my blog like I was getting MAYBE 2 views per post if I was lucky. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong because I was adding my blog to those follow for follow lists and promoting my posts, but noting was working. I was still posting reviews, hauls/wrap-ups, and unboxings while this was going on, but I was starting to question if it was worth it because literally had no one looking at it.

I knew that my reviews weren’t the best but I was a beginner and never considered myself to be good at writing essays for school and I was finding my reviewing style. Plus, I knew that the layout of my post were probably wonky because Wix offers my design freedom.

In January of 2019, I finally decided to switch to WordPress because I was honestly read to quit blogging because it wasn’t reaching anyone. I had moved all of my posts and content, but it wouldn’t have been the end of the world if nothing had transferred. Shortly after I changed blog sites, people started to notice my blog and were interacting! It helped that it was around the time were Kelly had created the Teen Directory and I met a lot of wonderful people. It seems like after I had some people coming to my blog, it was like the flood gates of creativity had opened. I had found the world of tags, started doing recommendations, and improved the overall flow of my blog (and my reviews were starting to get better!).

I also write tags (which are always fun because I can take a few moments to write something light – most of the time), recommendations, unboxings, weekly releases, hauls/wraps, and random posts!

Since the start of all of this, I have found a way to share my voice and a confidence in my writing that I didn’t have before.

My Advice:

• Write posts that you would want to read and let your readers help GUIDE (not dictate) the context. I love my followers and readers because it’s them who give me the motivation to keep blogging. Because when you feel forced to write something it’ll cause the quality to decrease, you to become burnout, and blogging will start to feel like work than a hobby. I feel like some of my best posts are from topics that are either completely random or something out side of the whole review, haul, wrap-up spectrum.

Rant: don’t go on social media and make comments like this, and just because you don’t agree with my choice of books for a challenge, you don’t have to start stuff like this. It’s a book photo. There are so many things wrong with this. #bookstagram #comments #bookphoto pic.twitter.com/jEBP0PWx5D

— Lauren Bodiford (@BodifordLauren) February 24, 2019

• Be respectful of all opinions. I know that’s easier said than done, but we should all try to remember that everyone has the right to say what they want (to a certain extent). I’ll be honest, there are people who love to leave negative comments, and to a new blogger (and every blogger in general) it can be heartbreaking to read such hateful words. In situations like those, I would recommend that you be the bigger person and thank them for their opinion (yes it’s sounds crazy, but it shows them and others that you’re not going to stoop tho their level) and wish them to have a nice day. If they keep on, try not to provide them with fuel to keep going because people like this thrives on this type of negative energy.
  • I know from person experience from an incident on bookstagram where a person I’ve never interacted with or seen on my account pop up with a comment saying that they didn’t agree with a book I had used for a theme for the day. I know as humans we want to keep going back and forth until we come out on top, but in the end, it isn’t bettering anyone and we just need to stop before it blows up into something big.

My Nominations:

As I was looking though my list of bloggers, I noticed that many of my nominations have a common thread of reviews, tags, discussion posts, and a couple of other fun bookish things. And I had it set up like Blogger’s name and blog: description of blog with type of posts. Well everything after the colon felt like I was a broken record, so I’m just going to name the person’s name along with their blog! But, know that each of the blogs that I’m nominating has wonderful content that I highly recommend that you check out!!,

• Xandra @ Starry Sky Books
• Lucy @ Lucy’s Novel Purpose
• Nick @ Read by Ray
• Becs @ Bookingway Reads
• Caitlin @ Caitlin Althea
• Kay @ Hammock of Books
• Blair @ Feed the Crime
• Megabunny Reads
• Laurel @ Tales Past Midnight
• Kaylee @ Kayl’s All Booked
• KayCKay
• Haley @ The Caffeinated Reader
• Rachel @ A Cascade of Books
• Mandy @ Devouring Books
• Katie @ Lune Lecteur Reviews

If you’ve already completed this, you can just link it in the comments below!

Happy reading until next time,