Blogger Recognition Award

 I would like to give thanks to my lovely and fabulous blogger friends: Josie, Kerry, Kristi, Lia, Raven, and Victoria for this nomination. ❤

This award was originally created by Eve over at Edge of the Night

Rules:

• Select 15 other blogs you want to give the award to. Do some digging if you must! Find those blogs. You cannot nominate yourself or the person who has nominated you.
• Write a post to show off your award! Give a brief story of how your blog got started, and give a piece or two of advice to new bloggers. Thank whoever nominated you, and provide a link to their blog. List who you’ve nominated in the post. Make sure to also attach the award itself! (You can do this by right-clicking, saving, and uploading the image above.)
• Comment on each blog and let them know you’ve nominated them. Provide a link to the award post you created.
• Provide a link to the original post on Edge of Night. That way, anyone can find the original guidelines and post if needed, and we can keep it from mutating and becoming confusing!

Story:

There isn’t an interesting story as how my blog came to be to be honest with you. In fact as you keep reading I may bore you to death….So feel free to skim (I’ll never know anyways 😉 )My blog actually didn’t even start out as a book blog. I wanted to have a journal/diary but I was weighing out the pros and cons of having to write one. I already knew that my hands would get tired of doing handwritten entries so a written journal was out of the question.  Then an online journal popped into my head; and the only dilemma that I had was having to choose which platform to use. I was torn between using Blogspot and WordPress, but in the end I chose WordPress.  I have a Tumblr, but that was mostly for re-posts and nothing really personal or my original thoughts.

Like most bloggers you already know what content you want on your blog–whether it’s about food, fashion, books, photography, personal opinions—things that I have interest in. I was actually quite unsure of what my blog was going to focus on. I didn’t want it to be just all over the place. For the first couple of months my blog was just going in different directions–from personal blog posts, food posts, fashion posts, bookish posts, and whatever nonsense I wanted to talk about. My blog headline at that time was actually: Incessant Ramblings which then became Incessant Ramblings on Books and Many Other Things, to Erika’s Book Ramblings, to Erika the Bibliophile, to now, Erika in Bookventureland. Looking back, what really got me into becoming a book blogger was the 30 Day Literature Challenge that I was doing. I read a lot of books, but really had no one to talk  to about it since most of my friends don’t read.  As a matter of fact one of my friends sees books this way–yea the Monster Book of Monsters.  I actually am not sure if I was amused or offended, probably both at the same time. It still boggles me as to why she is so averse to reading  books. Anyways, as I kept doing my book challenge I realized I wanted to talk more about books, thus, I decided to do a book review which I believe was The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen. From then on, I just wanted my blog to focus on books. It was also rather convenient since most of my followers were book bloggers. You can say that they had a great influence on me–so I extend my appreciation to my very first followers. You are all the real MVP. 😉

Advice:

There are so many advice out there that you can give a new blogger and at times it can be quite overwhelming especially if they are new to blogging and are still struggling to figure how they want to blog. I wanted my advice to be more general and not just focused on book bloggers, but because I’m a book blogger I’ll just give advice to this particular group. Anyways, if you read my post Secret Life Of A Book Blogger, I answered a question similar to this and provided some tips. Other than those tips I would say, be yourself and don’t try to compare yourself to other bloggers especially in terms of having a “successful” blog.  Blogging is not a competition. If you receive less likes and follows compared to another blogger it doesn’t mean your blog is not any better. I’ll say this again: the worth of your blog is not determined by the amount of likes and follows you have.

Furthermore,  blog for yourself and don’t concern yourself too much on what people would think of you. For example if you didn’t like a book that everyone else seems to love, don’t be afraid to write a negative review on it–just remember to do it politely and provide constructive criticism; and of course vice versa–i.e if you loved Twilight or Fifty Shades, fangirl all you want--it’s your blog.

But overall, have fun blogging!  It’s such a great way to express yourself as well as meet other people who share similar interests as you. 🙂

I’m aware that those who have nominated me already nominated some bloggers that I also follow. Therefore, to avoid a repeat nomination, I’m going to nominate other bloggers, since I’d like to get their wonderful blogs recognized. I wished I wasn’t limited to only 15, but for those who I  didn’t nominate for this award, please look out for the other blog awards I will be posting since I’d like to nominate different bloggers for each of them. 🙂

Without further ado my nominations for the Blogger Recognition Award are:

 Aine@ Writing On A Vintage Typerwiter

Anne@Anne-thology of Books

Annemieke @A Dance With Books

Bhramori@ thecrazyperfectionist

Charley@ booksandbakes1

Deanna @A Novel Glimpse

Emily@The Diary of A Bibliophile

Joey @Thoughts and Afterthoughts

Mathmagical Site

mattdwells1994

Matt@ thebookblogger2014

Nicole @awayinneverland

Summer@ xingsings

Senseless Scrutiny

Tiffani@ THEBOOKVENOM

If you are not interested in receiving this award or have already been nominated and made a post, you can disregard.  Hope you all have a wonderful day/night wherever you are in the world. ❤