If it wasn’t already clear, I’ll be blunt — I was disappointed and frustrated by my day spent at BEA Bloggers. It felt like a conference featuring what the publishing industry wants bloggers to be interested in (Authors! Swag! Famous people!), rather than what I think bloggers are actually interested in (connecting with each other in the real world).
This isn’t going to be a post that summarizes the day; I’ll link to a few of those recaps at the end. Instead, I’m going to try to outline my broad concerns with the conference organization and try to offer some suggestions for what I would like to see done differently next year.
News and Notes
Hello to everyone stopping by from Book Expo America or Armchair BEA. If all is going well, when this post goes up I’ll be on my way to the airport for a week hanging out with fellow readers in New York City. I’m so excited!
(And, because what we really all care about is books, I want to tell you that I have two packed for my travels: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and And the Heart Says Whatever by Emily Gould.)
Because I was both frustrated and concerned by the issues the revised FTC Guides raised, I did a couple of papers for this ethics class looking at the intersection of blogging and journalism ethics, specifically the issues of objectivity and transparency. (I even wrote about the project here on the blog, and solicited some feedback on the FTC Guides for my final paper).
Anyway, that’s a long-ish way of getting around to introducing the topic I’m writing about for the blog tour — objectivity versus transparency, and what guidance those two ethics might be able to offer book bloggers as we go about our day-to-day blogging habits or face bigger ethical questions. I know it’s a little more abstract than some of the other topics on the tour, but I hope you’ll stick with me!
You may or may not have seen that Goodreads and the American Association of Publishers announced the four winners of the first annual Independent Book Blogger Awards this afternoon… and I’m one of the winners!
What? I know, it’s crazy.
When I first looked ahead to March, I wrote that one of my goals was to get caught up with books I’ve accepted for review consideration. Looking back on the month, I think I was half successful with that goal — I’ve read all but one of the books I had on my plate for March, but I am woefully behind on writing reviews for them.
While I don’t do a ton of author interviews here on the blog (I do plenty of interviews as part of my day job!), I always get a thrill when I have the chance to ask more experienced writers and journalists to talk a little bit about their craft.
Mitchell Zukoff, the author of this year’s winner of the Indie Lit Award for Nonfiction, Lost in Shangri-La, was gracious enough to answer questions put together by the nonfiction panel including how he found the topic the story, what it was like to travel to New Guinea during research, and one piece of writing advice he offers his students.
Last week, the winners of this year’s Indie Lit Awards (book awards given out by literary bloggers) were announced, and I posted reviews of all five shortlisted books here on the blog. But in the frenzy of posting all those reviews (and getting to write about a Hunger Games-related book in time for the movie premier), I didn’t get to spend much time reflecting on the awards more generally. Hence, the topic of today’s post.
One of my reading goals for this year was to read an essay every single day. Reading essays — both online and in collections — has helped remind me about all the great, short nonfiction there is out there. And, I think we’re living in a particularly robust time for long-form writing, which makes it easy for readers that are tentative about trying nonfiction to find something to enjoy.
Now that 2011 is gone and we’re trucking along into 2012, I can finally share with you the nonfiction short list for the Indie Lit Awards. This year, Biography/Memoir got split off from the Nonfiction category, which means our nonfiction list is chock full of intensely long and serious nonfiction reads. Seriously. Every book on this list is more than 400 pages long. So much reading!
Yesterday I posted my short list of favorite fiction reads of 2011 — The Magicians, Domestic Violets, When She Woke, The Art of Fielding, and The Imperfectionists. Today I’ve got five of my favorite nonfiction reads to share. They’re in no particular order — trying to rank them would have just been too difficult! Thoughts?
