Customer Reviews

The Bookaholics' Guide to Book Blogs: the new literary force

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Gillieron and Kilgarriff present an array of book blogs for every taste from erudite to off-the-grid. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, at least in the bloggers' minds.

Despite an unconscionable number of typos (especially considering the authors are editor and publisher respectively at the British publishing house Marion Boyars), this is an entertaining and informative survey, steering readers to sites they may never have heard of, from the thoughtfully appealing Dovegreyreader to the in-your-face Social Disease.

The authors organize their chapters by type of blog, i.e., Author Blogs; Booksellers Blogs; Fan Blogs, Obsessives and the Extreme; The Literary Establishment and Its Blogs, and also by theme, i.e., Review Pages vs. the Internet; Alter Egos or Inflated Egos: Why Do People Blog?; The Internet and Its Uses: Dialogues about Freedom of Expression and Personal Interest.

They include background material on how and why the blogs got started and plenty of quotes, some of them extensive, to give readers an idea of style and substance. There are blogs that stick to what the blogger is reading and blogs that venture out to the latest literary parties and gossip; blogs that fulminate and blogs that promote; blogs that shock and blogs that inspire.

They discuss the role of genre blogs, the influence of the Internet on reader's choices and the future of print reviews. These discussions are thoughtful enough but the meat of the book is the helpful introduction to the vast seething sea of book blogs out there. You could spend all your time reading blogs and never get to a book or you could use this handy guide to steer you to those that appeal and avoid the rest.

First Line: To my way of thinking, the best book bloggers are individuals who have no grist or motive other than a love of books and a desire to share their finds with others.

It should be obvious why I bought this book: I'm a blogger, and I blog about books. I wanted to see what these two publishers had to say about a subject I hold close to my heart.

The Bookaholics' Guide to Book Blogs is divided into chapters according to the various types of blogs: Booksellers' Blogs, Publishers' Blogs, Fan Blogs, Writers' Blogs, etc. As I read, I found several blogs that are familiar to me, but I also found many more to check out. Gillieron and Killgarriff both believe that book bloggers have a very important function in the world of book publishing today:

"I would like to see the voices of the book bloggers heard even louder. I think there is a major problem, despite the pages of feverish comment on literary prizes, radio shows, interviews and profiles, in that the media manages to talk about books in a way that goes over the heads of the vast majority of people. The book bloggers have developed loyal audiences, and I compare them most closely to newspaper columnists who may be your favourite to read each week in the Sunday paper. You get to know a personality and a style, and you find nuggets of new information each week, which makes you go back the following week for more. The book bloggers have another twist which makes them more loveable-- they write their thoughts for free."



There are dozens of nuggets of information in this small book, and best of all, a list of all the book blogs' URLs in the back to make it easier for you to find them. I found this book very easy to read (despite several typos!), and a very informative look into the future of book publishing and selling from the viewpoints of two UK publishers.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect of this book when I first picked it up:

Would it be a list of the author's favourite book blogging sites, a guide to the multitude of sites appearing all over the web?

Would it include any of the book blogging sites I am already familiar with?

Would it give me new sites to explore?

Would it give me food for thought about different ways of presenting opinions about books, and the role of the web in presenting these views?

The answer to each of these questions is yes. I don't always agree with the opinions expressed by the authors but I am grateful to them for taking the time to write and publish them. This is a book of suggestions and opinions, not a prescriptive guide to what might be considered `good' or `bad'. We each can make our own subjective assessment based on taste and coverage.

Perhaps the aspect I enjoyed most was the observation that each of us who occupy space in this virtual terrain has an alter ego, and some of us have inflated egos as well. We may choose our own alter ego but others will make a decision about whether they consider that ego to be inflated. A humbling thought, perhaps.

I'd recommend this book to those who are interested in a wider view of the world of book blogging and on-line reviewing that is larger than our own individual contributions.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

OK, I admit it. I got this book because of its cover. It featured several of Adele Geras' books and since her Ithaka has been looking at me reproachfully from my "To be Read" pile, I had been hoping for a review of Geras' work. I didn't get it.

What I got instead was a wonderful tour through the literary blogosphere that really captures the issues of writing, publishing, selling books, and reviewing in the age of the blog on the one hand and huge corporations on the other. (And yes, amazon is discussed at length.)

In the process, I was introduced to blogs that help writers get published (e.g., Miss Snark, the Literary Agent), writers' blogs (e.g., Toby Litt and Jeanette Winterson), book sellers' blogs (The Bedside Crow had me with this post: "I put a customer's credit card into the PDQ machine He punches in his four digit number. There is a long pause while the machine thinks. We both wait and wonder; does the bank have any money?") and review blogs (e.g., bookninja). In the process, I learned about Virtual Book Tours and online book clubs. I also learned that small, independent publishers scout websites such as frontlist.com for talent but I hesitate to recommend frontlist in this review.

But most of all, I learned about where to go to at least begin to find quality book blogs. For, in the literary blogosphere, the problem (for me at least) has not been one of separating the good blogs from the bad but of finding the good to begin with. In this regard, Rebecca Gillieron's and Catheryn Kilgarriff's recommendations have been invaluable. I didn't always agree with them--but they were an excellent place to start and since most blogs have a blog roll that's all I needed, really.

The only reason this book gets four, rather than five stars is the ridiculous number of typos in it. Given that Gillieron and Kilgarriff represent a publishing house, they should have been able to catch the "aa" instead of "a" and the sentences missing verbs (or having two verbs where one was plenty). And since they didn't proofread their own book, I deducted a star.

Otherwise this is an excellent book. I recommend it.

This book. penned by a publisher and an editor, both female, appears to me to be an absolute insider's view of the book world. It is full of "insider"-abbreviations and slang terms I'd never previously encountered. There are also references to publishers, book shops and the like previously unknown to me, but apparently household names to everybody else in the world.

I usually restrict myself to serious books about health and spiritual matters, among other things, so I found the book to be a somewhat superfluous offering, though light-hearted and entertaining (and there is a need of light-hearted and entertaining books).

It introduces us to blogs about every subject imaginable and includes long extracts from the blogs of various apparently well-known bloggers. It deals with booksellers' blogs, publishers' blogs, fan blogs, etc etc. It discusses and cites pornographic blogs, and presents us with some macabre excerpts.

There's a chapter about the internet in general and one comparing traditional book reviews to blogs.

The chapter I most enjoyed was the final one, treating of audio- and e-books, and introducing me to Martin Ames.

I learnt about The Book Depository, which is actually a store I often have bought books from, through Amazon, though unaware of the fact of its being a major bookseller in its own right.

Not until page 243 out of 247 was it actually mentioned how the beginner can himself or herself find a site on which to blog, which I was wondering about. But, thus, eventually, we do learn that we can open a Google account and start a blog on blogger.com. Or on livejournal.com, which is the site we are advised to investigate.

There is also a lovely, comprehensive list of blog sites at the end of the book, so the reader can explore further on his/her own.

Unfortunately, the book was marred by the many typos, omissions of words, etc, etc, and even one grave grammatical error, that I wouldn't have expected in a book written by a publisher/editor duo.

But to sum up, an entertaining book for those interested in blogs and the book world as a whole, though in my view not a work of importance, i.e. not a book that I would regard as a must read. Thus only 3 stars. But the book was a refreshing addition to my library and extended my universe by introducing me to the new (for me) fascinating world of blogging.

If you aren't familiar with the universe of book blogs, this book by publishing world insiders in the UK is a helpful introduction and overview circa 2007. Published in 2007, this book discusses the issues surrounding book blogs, book reviewing and the diverse kinds of book blogs: publishers' blogs, authors' blogs, fan blogs, popular blogs, e-books and the future of book selling.

The book blog world has evolved in the past five years and so has book publishing with the ascendancy of e-books,
e-book readers becoming more accessible etc. This book provides a snapshot of the first years of book blogs--an update of this book discussing where we are today regarding book blogs, are book blogs as relevant, which ones are flourishing and why and the future of book blogs would be fascinating by these same authors.