Armchair BEA: Wrap-Up

Design by Emily @ Emily's Reading Room

Round-Up

This was my first year participating in Armchair BEA, and I had a great time!  I consider it a personal accomplishment that I posted in response to at least one of the prompts every day.  I credit this feat to having two choices per day.  If I wasn't feeling one topic, I usually had plenty to say about the other.  I also liked the discussion on blogging habits in general.  It was nice to have an opportunity to voice some of my concerns about my blogging habits and to see what others are doing that make them successful.

Day One: Introductory Post
Day Two: Blogger Development
Day Three: Literary Fiction
Day Four: Blogger Ethics
Day Five: Children's/Young Adult Literature

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Through Armchair BEA, I engaged in some thought-provoking conversations and learned a lot. In fact, as a direct result of my participation in the ethics chat, I am currently re-vamping my use of images on the site to be more ethical.  Ignorance is no excuse!  These two sites are very informative:

Nose Graze: Why You Shouldn't Use Book Cover Images Straight From Goodreads (technical advice about bandwith stealing)
Oh, Chrys!: Ethics in Blogging (common sense advice for bloggers)

New Follower Shout-Outs

I also found a lot of great new blogs to follow including:

Tattooed Books
Badass Book Reviews
Chapter Break
The Hollow Cupboards
The Novel Hermit

Look to the Future

Since this was my first year participating in Armchair BEA, I don't have any suggestions for improvement.  Everything seemed to click along pretty fluidly to me.  The link-up process was easy, but I do have to echo some other bloggers' concerns that it was quite a few posts to wade through every day if you had the time.  I don't know if there's a way to streamline the links - especially because I wouldn't want to lose the inclusive nature of the event - but it was hard to choose which blogs to visit!  I felt like I was playing a blind game of pin-the-tail on the donkey sometimes, but it paid off as evidenced by my new follower shout-outs above.  Overall, I hope to keep the momentum I cultivated by participating in Armchair BEA, and I am already looking forward to next year!