#BookBlogWriMo DAY EIGHT: Our Blog Tool Kit...or something!

#BookBlogWriMo #DayEight brings us to our blogging tool kit...what we like to do to make our bloggy lives easier.

Ummm, this one is hard to pin down in one little post. Especially right now when my brain is epically fried! But we'll try. 

I think what I like best, is html. That is the best in anyone's arsenal is to pick tour posts, if you are going to tour, that send html files for building posts. I see word on the street now and again that some blogs are deleted by blogger or wordpress for using html, and I hope that isn't true. To combat that...or I hope that we're combatting that because we've been doing it for nearly two years, is to tweak each individual post after it is saved so that changes are made. The problem I think, is that if blogger thinks you're spamming people it will delete you. The key is to NOT spam! Hah! So, that is my take anyways. 

HTML posts were the best thing invented. FOR REAL. It allows us to concentrate more on reviewing or tweaking a post than trying to hunt down information or photos or reformat things, etc. So I LOVE html.

I also love, love, love the schedule feature. Blogging made easier is by preparing as much as possible in advance of what you want to say and when you want to say it, so my advice SCHEDULE-SCHEDULE-SCHEDULE! We accidentally found our how to do this one day, when I thought went to save a cover reveal and instead "published" it on the date I scheduled. We had been trying to figure it out for a while before that, and there were many a morning that we got up at 5 am to get everything posted before the early morning deadlines. I must say that nothing will give you a heart attack more than thinking you had released a cover of a book earlier than you were supposed to. Whew. 

Yes. Being able to schedule things ahead of time is wonderful; especially because Court and I are walking zombies half the time; this feature allows us to work ahead as much as possible.

My third thing that I feel is the most important probably in this whole toolkit thing, is to be the blogger and build your blog into what YOU want it to be. Shelley and I have had probably hundreds of conversations regarding this seemingly simple topic. It is easy to get bullied in the world of social media, and absolutely buried in requests for review and promotion and all of the other things that go along with book blogging, all while being the cornerstones of our families and holding full time (plus some) jobs. I think we've found a balance in trying to help out as many authors as we can, read the books WE WANT TO READ! and hopefully continue to make friends along the way while remembering why we started blogging in the first place. We wanted something that was our own. We wanted to share books we really enjoyed, and enjoy them with our fellow reader. Just be you, be epic, and it will all fall into place. 

We've definitely had challenges and been sucked in to trying to be everything to everybody but I think we've made progress and I think we'll continue to adjust until this thing is exactly what we want it to be--something we love. 

I'd add to Court's list--a calendar. We have a calendar that we both use and keeps us on task and on a reading schedule--otherwise we'd be lost. We've color coded it for different types of posts and it's a life saver, for sure.

Lastly, I'd say that having people you like to work with (or love to work with--COURT!) is hugely important. There are times when one of us is overwhelmed with life and work and the other person steps in and takes over and with the volume of mail and things we want to do here, it's absolutely necessary to have a partner (or partners) you can work with, whom you respect, and can communicate honestly with. I'm lucky; I have Court.