Time // 10:00 a.m.

Place // At my desk, again.

Eating // Cinnamon Cheerios and cherries (cherries finally went on sale this week and they are SO GOOD).

Drinking // Black tea and water.

Reading // I finished a bunch of books this week, although aside from The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer (which I liked a lot but didn’t fall in love with), they were all pretty short — two middle grade biographies for a paid review I’m working on (Father Groppi by Stuart Stotts and Mary Nohl by Barbara Manger and Janine Smith) and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling for a re-read marathon with my sister. I also finished the last few chapters of Getting Things Done by David Allen, but I’m feeling a little intimidated with how to implement the system and actually start getting things done.

This week, I’m not sure what I am going to try to read. I feel like I’m in one of those moments where I have so many great options to choose from and I can’t quite pick. We’ll see what catches my eye later today.

Watching // The boyfriend and I have been slowly watching the new episodes of Arrested Development, which I think are very funny but also disjointed and missing some of the family dynamics I loved so much from the original series. I think we’ll finish watching them this week. I also watched Anna Karenina (I liked it a lot) and started watching House of Cards on Netflix. I actually don’t know anything about where this series is going, but I suspect dark places since Kevin Spacey’s character killed a dying dog in the opening minutes of the pilot.

Making // While I was binge-watching House of Cards last night, I made some good progress on my sampler. It now just says BITCH, which makes me laugh.

Blogging // This week was Armchair BEA, so all of my posts were focused on the blogging side of book blogging. I wrote an introduction, a post about how I make money blogging, a post on blogging ethics and transparency, and a post where I offered to do personal nonfiction recommendations. The personal recommendations post seemed to be a hit — enough that I am going to think about turning it into a regular feature once I sort out the logistics.

Exercising // I think one of the reasons I was able to read so many books this month (12!) is because I’ve been neglecting to exercise. I need to change that, for both my physical and mental health, so I got up this morning and went for a run (Week 4, Day 1 of Couch to 5K). It was hard, but I feel good about it. I’d like to get into a habit of exercising right away in the morning, but we’ll see how successful I am at that. The last time I was able to exercise consistently for a long period of time was when I had a buddy to exercise with and I don’t have one of those right now.

Avoiding // I made a big project list for the weekend, and while I’ve checked off all of my chores I’ve been avoiding my writing projects. I’d like to get posts for the week written and scheduled, a professional review written, and catch up on comments. I think I can do it if I just settle in and focus, but we’ll see.

Anticipating // Vacation! I’m not leaving for vacation until the end of the month, but I am already getting excited about being away from work and relaxing for an entire week.

Happy Sunday, everyone! What are you reading today?

When I saw that one of the genre-focused topics for Armchair BEA was nonfiction, I got really excited. Reading and recommending nonfiction is what I’m known for around the blogosphere (to the extent that I’m really “known” by that many people), so it’s a perfect prompt for me.

The problem I discovered as I sat down to write is that it’s almost too big. I love nonfiction of all styles and topics so much that I really didn’t know where to start in writing this post even with the help of the prompts provided by the kind hosts of Armchair BEA.

After some hemming and hawing, I decided to turn the topic around a little bit. One of the things I love doing is making nonfiction recommendations, especially to people who don’t read a lot of nonfiction or don’t know where to start with the genre because they feel intimidated or think that nonfiction is boring (it’s doesn’t have to be!).

So instead of writing about nonfiction I love, I want to take today’s prompt as an opportunity to make personalized nonfiction recommendations to anyone who wants one.

To get a recommendation, leave a comment on this post answering these three questions:

1. What is a recent “thing” (book, movie, television show, etc.) that you loved and would like to learn more about?
2. What kind of nonfiction are you looking (Light? Serious? Personal? Academic? Anything?)
3. Do you have any bookish pet peeves or favorite qualities in a book I should know about?

Over the next couple of days, I’ll respond to each comment with a recommendation for one or two nonfiction books that I think you should try based on your answers. To see your recommendation, please subscribe to the comments or check back over the weekend.

I can’t guarantee that every recommendation will be a hit, but I hope they’ll give you a starting point for getting into nonfiction or, if you already read and love nonfiction, an idea for a new book or author to try. Thanks for playing!

Today’s blogger development topic for Armchair BEA is ethics:

We get back into discussions on Friday with the heavy topic of ethics. Do you have recommendations to new bloggers to ensure credit is given to whom/where credit is due? Have you had an experience with plagiarism? How did you deal with it? What are the guidelines as bloggers that we must follow?

Blogging ethics is actually a topic that I care a lot about. I spent a lot of time in grad school learning about journalism ethics, and did some exploring about how online ethics are both different and the same as the codes of ethics that journalists agree to follow.

Last May, I participated in a blog tour with several other bloggers to talk about ethics, practices and politics of book blogging. For the tour, I wrote a post about objectivity and transparency online and how I think those two terms can be confused. There’s this idea that people who write reviews should be “objective,” which I personally don’t think makes sense. Instead, I think it makes more sense for bloggers to be transparent — being open about personal biases or potential conflicts as a way of building a relationship with readers. Basically, it’s just being honest.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’m just going to share a section of that post that includes my suggestions for ways to be more transparent in your blogging:

How Can I Be More Transparent?

Being transparent can cover a lot of ground — everything from how you approach reviews to what information you decide to share about yourself to the decisions you make about whether or not to try and make money from your writing. These are some of my personal and collected tips about how to incorporate transparency into your blogging. I welcome more suggestions, and even disagreement, on these ideas!

Link, link, link! (Or, cite your sources). It’s better to over reference your sources than it is to under reference them. Even if you aren’t quoting a source directly, anything that helped inspire or influence your thoughts on a topic needs to be linked to, somewhere (even if it’s just at the end in a “Sources Referenced” section. It seems to me that most recent plagiarism controversies are a result of poorly citing sources.

Share information about yourself on an About Me page. You don’t have to share everything, but a reader should be able to go to an About Me page on your blog and learn a little bit about you and your perspective on the world.

Disclose your relationships. I think its generally become common practice for bloggers to have some sort of disclosure statement on reviews for books they received for review consideration from publishers. If you don’t do that… you should. (It’s a good transparency practice and it’s required by the FTC Guides mentioned above).

Other disclosures are equally important, but I don’t think get as much attention. If you’re friends with an author, you should disclose that if you decide to review their book. If you’ve been paid to mention something (or, if you get a bonus for doing so… a free book, whatever), you should disclose that. This is a pet peeve of mine; I see bloggers involved with giveaways and promotions ALL THE TIME, and there aren’t always notes about what the blogger gets in return. If a post is sponsored or you get a perk for running it, that should be very, very clear.

Basically, disclose anything that others could perceive as influencing your thoughts on a book (or product, or whatever).

Distinguish original content with paid content. This goes hand in hand with previous suggestion — it should be crystal clear what kind of content a reader is coming to when they arrive at a new post.

Be accountable. Admit your mistakes. Don’t give favored treatment to any special interests, and don’t let outsiders impact your content decisions. Disclose any favors you’ve received from outside sources if you write about them or something you’re connected to. And expose unethical practices (without being vicious) when you discover them. (Thanks to Cyberjournalist.net for these ideas).

Make a note when you change something important in a post. If you put up a post and realize you’ve made a significant mistake, or something isn’t worded the way you’d like, make sure the correction is clear. It’s poor practice to edit a post after it’s live without mentioning you’ve made a change. It makes readers feel like they’ve been tricked, and readers commenting won’t know what “version” of the post other readers are referencing. Use strike-throughs or lines that say “EDITED TO ADD” or something to distinguish changes.

When in doubt, admit what you don’t know. If you remember reading an article that sparked an idea for you, but you can’t find it… just admit that. A simple, “This isn’t originally my idea; I found it online but I didn’t save the link… can anyone help?” could save you worlds of trouble. If someone gets you the link, update the post to add it — problem solved!

This week is a big one for people who love books. While many publishers, bloggers, authors, readers and writers are in New York City for Book Expo America, those of us left behind are talking about books and blogging as part of Armchair BEA. Today’s blogging topic is all about blogger development:

Day two we we talk about how we develop ourselves as bloggers. Have you branched out into your community? Do you partner with other bloggers? Have you gone “pro” or begun supplementing your income through your blog? Are you a long-term blogger, and how has your online personality developed over the years? These are simply ideas. Think development and tell us what comes to mind.

I’ve been blogging for five years, but I didn’t start earning any money from my blog until about a year ago. I’m certainly not an expert in monetizing your blog, but I thought for today’s topic it might be helpful to share how I make a little money as a way to demystify how it can work (with the caveat that this is only my experience and certainly doesn’t represent the only or even best way to make a little money blogging).

I earn income from blog-related activities in two ways: advertising on this site and freelance writing and reviewing. On the advertising side, I work with a company called LitBreaker, which specializes in advertising for book-related blogs. The CEO, Jason Chambers, has been great to work with and I like that the ads are bookish. The amount of money I earn each month varies and depends on the number of views my site gets and the number of people who click on ads.

As a freelancer (not my day job), I write regularly for Book Riot and do occasional reviews for some other publications. Pitching freelance pieces is a whole different ballgame that I wrote a little bit about during last year’s Armchair BEA. Book Riot pays (basically) based on pageviews, while the other publications I write for pay a flat rate for each piece.

Because real numbers can be helpful, over the last 12 months my blogging income has broken down like this:

• LitBreaker: $310
• Freelancing: $282
• TOTAL: $592

A chunk of the money I earn goes back into blogging. Because I’m self-hosted, I pay Bluehost to host my blog, GoDaddy for my domain, and a security site, Sucuri, to protect my blog from hackers (you can read about how my blog was hacked in this post).

In a year, those regular expenses total about $185. I’ve also had one-time payments for things like a custom blog theme, registration for the Book Blogger Convention, or other blog-related technology that I use some of the income to pay.

Obviously I’m not quitting my day job with any of this, but it’s nice that I’ve got a couple of ways to help pay for ongoing site maintenance (and, let’s be honest, a few books). If you have any more specific questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments section!