The Blog Squad: A Blogger Collaboration - Part XVII

We are a group of three book bloggers situated on different continents but brought together by our love for books and a penchant for talking about them. We’ve joined our forces to create a collaborative series of posts about book blogging and we hope you’ll enjoy the discussions.

A MAGICAL WORLD OF WORDS - AmyNikita

BOOKS.BAGS.BURGERS - Uma K

BOOK REVIEWS BY DI - Di Hewlett

Author Interaction - Your Take

I love it when authors interact with readers and bloggers! I regularly converse with quite a few wonderful authors and I love it. But I must say, most of this interaction happens on email or Twitter and rarely on the blog itself. I’ve had maybe 2 or 3 author comments on my blog.

On Twitter I’ve had authors thank me for a review, retweet my tweets, reply to comments and such. Every small interaction makes me flail like a drunk bird. It feels wonderful to have authors acknowledge you, listen to your comments about their book and stuff. I believe author-blogger interaction helps both! It makes authors feel good about the effort they put into reading and reviewing books. It makes authors know more about their audience and what they like.

But like Amy and Di say, I wish the interaction happened on the blog as much as it happens on social media. I would be absolutely thrilled if an author were to comment on my blog itself!

I agree with Di about authors not interacting with you on your blog. I haven’t really thought about it until now but it’s a good point. I suppose they just don’t have time to comment on the glowing review you’ve written of their book? I guess? That’s totally understandable, but it’s a thought-provoking point Di’s made.
However, I would LOVE it if one day an author did comment on my review of his or her book (a positive review, of course ;) Once, an author commented on my Waiting on Wednesday post when it was his book that was I was featuring, and that was AWESOME.
 
As for Twitter…..Oh, it’s always AMAZING when an author retweets your tweet or replies to it or likes it or follows you AND I ALWAYS HAVE A MINI HEART ATTACK WHEN THAT HAPPENS!! (actually not so mini). It’s seriously awesome, and I so admire and respect those authors who take the time to reply to comments and interact with their readers. It’s so inspiring. For example, Stephanie Garber - author of Caraval - is one of the sweetest authors I’ve ever interacted with online. She replies to almost every tweet and makes such an amazing effort to connect with her readers. She’s brilliant, and so inspiring.
 
I’m so honoured and grateful I’ve gotten to interact with the most incredible authors online, and they repeatedly inspire me to do the same if one day I become a well-known writer myself.   

Have you ever had a troll on your blog/social media?

Ummm… I had a sort of troll on my blog once. This person (Let's say X) commented on one my posts saying one of my other commenters was a fake person or something. I promptly replied saying I knew the commenter and it was X who seemed to be fake. So X removed the previous comments and apologized. I’ve never had this person comment on my blog again.
 
I haven’t had any trolls on social media except those random followers everyone gets now and then who I promptly remove!

Hmmm...does an author troll count?! Probably not, so otherwise there hasn’t really been anyone who’s harassed me over social media. Yet. And I know I’m seriously lucky.

What do you do about negative feedback?

Any kind of feedback is wonderful but I’m not just gonna lie and say that negative feedback makes me happy, because it doesn’t. Negative feedback often makes me doubt myself, my blog and it’s content. Now that’s no fun right? That being said, I’m completely okay with people pointing out if any of my widgets aren’t working or if I made a mistake in my content or if my blog takes too long to load etc. That kind of feedback is absolutely welcome and I’d be grateful for those!
 
And while I’ve had very less negative feedback, certain of those have made me feel very bad. Someone once left a HUGE comment saying that CSS and HTML editing had to be done to my blog as it had many “problems”. I honestly don’t know what this person was trying to say but the fact that someone left an entire comment (about 10 lines long) criticizing my blog made me feel bad. Another time I had someone tell me my instagram pictures weren’t good or aesthetic enough and that made me feel so bad as I spend hours working on my instagram photoshoots and I really do think they’re pretty. But yeah I’ve learnt that giving too much thought to these comments are only going to make me feel worse so I try not to let it get to me.

I agree with Di: taking negative criticism as constructive criticism is what I try to do, too. It can definitely still hurt, though, but I try to look at it more optimistically. That being said, I’m with Di on how you can’t please everyone. You’d be constantly changing your blog design (for example) if you listened to everything everyone ever said about it.  I think you have to try “seperate” yourself - to an extent - from the negative criticisms you’ll get. It can get extremely demoralising, and take the pleasure away from blogging altogether.  
 
I also totally agree with Uma about mistakes being pointed out in widgets or reviews, etc. That feedback is ABSOLUTELY welcome, and I see it as helpful rather than negative.
 
But truth be told, I’m my own worst enemy when it comes to criticising my blog and content and photos, etc etc. So it’s a lose-lose situation, I guess ;) But sometimes I just have to force myself to suck it up and chill.

To see my answers make sure to visit the other collab posts!

A MAGICAL WORLD OF WORDS

BOOKS.BAGS.BURGERS

We hope you’ve enjoyed our discussion post! Please talk to us and let us know YOUR answers below. What do you think of our responses? If you have any specific questions you’d like us to address in the future, please let us know in the comments section below. Stay tuned for next week’s questions!