Although our new blog has been up and running for two weeks now, June 1st was our original target date for all of this to happen. But I have to thank LK and Dan, my fellow reviewers, for making this all happen so quickly. I haven’t come across anyone yet who hasn’t liked the changes we made. The feedback from our guest book has all been positive. But I still wanted to take a moment to explain why we made these changes. I’d also like to point out some of the advantages our new blog presents to its readers.
First, LK, Dan, and I all agreed we’d outgrown the old blog. The limitations of its format made things very hard to find and only put focus on the latest information. We discovered many readers came back searching for older posts such as our Lulu Top 10 Book Boo Boos list or our Marketing Tip Madness post. So, we wanted to organize the blog in such a way that would allow easy access to our reference information, and make it as easy as finding a word in the dictionary. Organizing the entire blog by categories and subcategories quickly solved that. We even organized all of the reviews by genre and by reviewer so they can be found again much easier. This eliminated that long list of table of contents of reviews we had on the old blog.
Our favorite physical change has to be the scrolling marquee at the top of the home page which features the most recent 6 posts. The older 7th, 8th, and 9th posts fall right below the marquee, followed by older, but important, posts divided into table of contents right below that. This type of organization allows a plethora of information to all remain on the home page at one time. Also, please notice our blogroll in the right sidebar is also divided into three categories: Review Sites, Toolbox, and Connect. This puts focus on the other different blogs/sites we link to and how their purpose can best serve authors and readers.
A last minute change happened with our Pick Me! tab where authors submit their book for a possible review. Recently, our email box was filling up with emails from authors checking on the status of their book. Since there are three of us in three different states reviewing books, this usually required another email to be sent to the reviewer to “check in” on how the review was going. So, we decided to add status updates to each query on the Pick Me! tab so authors could get an idea of when their book might be reviewed. Now, the queries will not be deleted from the tab until we have either rejected the work or posted a review of it.
We also decided to start reviewing poetry again. With Lulu’s recent purchase of the poetry.com domain, I thought it was time to welcome emerging poets back to the POD pact. Our one stipulation for poetry reviewing is that the book must be available on Amazon.com and must have an ISBN number. I figured if poets are serious enough to make their chapbooks available there, then they were being serious enough about their poetry, as Lulu likes to call itself the home of the largest bad poetry collection and I’d love to beat that stigma. And yes, I know Lulu isn’t the only place poetry is published, but I think the ISBN and Amazon.com availability will weed out some of the bad verse.
With that said, our biggest change to the blog has to be our name, domain, and the addition of CreateSpace and Wordclay to our shortlist of books we’ll review. The domain and name change happened because of the addition of CS and WC. We chose these two companies because they both closely resemble the DIY business model that has made Lulu so popular. While we still embrace Lulu authors and still welcome their books, we felt a slight name change would help us to broaden our appeal to authors outside of Lulu who might not have published with any of these companies but are still looking for useful information.
We are also adding focus to online previews of the books we review. If a preview is not already available, we will point authors in the direction of companies like Smashwords and fReado to help authors market their books and reach a wider audience. Don’t forget…Lulu authors have the ability to add a free preview on their book’s Lulu page. There’s also the Search Inside feature available to you for free at Amazon.com no matter who you published with!
And that’s about it! A new look and some new books!
Welcome to the new LLBR!
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