Two years ago I decided to move my book reviews from my personal blog to my own web site. So it’s time to do a bit of a year in review, and write some resolutions.
First, there’s the purpose of the site: 92 books reviewed on the site since last August 20th. All books were freshly read. Just a few books short of averaging two books per week. A few of the reviews have managed to get a bit of attention. Just a bit though. Ted Rall liked my review of his book Silk Road To Ruin and linked to that review from his web site. My traffic doubled. In March, David Louis Edelman, in some sort of self-flagellation, linked to my fairly negative review of his book Infoquake. And last month, Darryl Ponicsan quoted my review of Walla Walla Suite on his site. On one hand, it’s nice to get a bit of recognition. On the other though, I’m sad it’s not from readers. During the last year, I worked in a bookstore for eight months, which gave me access to a number of advanced readers copies. Some of them I’ve even read in advance of the publication date! Let me tell you, I do love free stuff!
Speaking of readers, the site is up to about 10 regular readers now. Most folks seem to search for a specific title via a search engine, come read the review here, and move on.
I did try one thing new. I tried a Harmful Books
reading group. Theoretically, some of my local friends were to read these books with me and we’d have ourselves an online/in person group. Sadly, our subject matter was too dense and I was the only person to finish the first book. So that experiment is done for.
I’ve done some fairly significant work on the site over the last year. Rat’s Reading now uses the Simplr theme. I love it! I’ve always been a minimalist in web design, so it fits right in with what I like. I added the Now Reading
plug-in as well, for displaying what is upcoming, as well as for keeping statistics on books read. I’ve changed some of the entry formatting as well. The cataloging, book covers, and linking to Amazon are better formatted, and work in most feed readers as well. I’m almost finished with editing all the older reviews to change them to the new format. And lastly, I revamped the categories to be mimic a bit better that which folks would find in major bookstores. Hopefully that’ll make it easier to find stuff in which people are interested.
And one last year in review note: the site finally topped $10 in total revenue from the Amazon links! Which means my revenue is somewhere in the neighborhood of about 2¢ per hour. It’s a grand hobby!
So what’s coming up in the next year? Who knows really? There’s one definite change that’ll be coming up. Shortly, readers will start to see blog entries that are not book reviews. I’d like my ego stroked a bit by links and comments. The reviews don’t spark much in the way of discussion. And I certainly have a lot of opinions to share! Luckily for readers, I’ll keep them confined to stuff relating to books and reading. The point of these entries being to get people to discuss!
Over the last few months, I’ve approached a couple of friends about reviewing books for the site as well. I still haven’t talked anyone into it, but it may happen during the next year. I can’t read as much as I’d like, and I want to get more book reviews up. Particularly, in areas in which I don’t read as much.
Anything else people want to see? Contests? Quizzes? Author interviews? A podcast?
In the meantime, here’s hoping I can get my own reading up to a two books per week average! More books! More books! Damn I love my books!
