We were tagged in this joint blogging Q&A tag by the lovely sisters at Fashion Du Jour LDN! As you know, Chapter Break is a run blog by two very awesome ladies (Julie and Lynn), so we’re sharing some insight on our joint blogging.
Q1: What made you want to write a blog together?
Julie: Actually, I started this book blog with another friend and book club gal, Rose in 2013. Lynn is one of our friends and also in the same book club and joined the team in 2014. But then Rose stopped blogging, so now it is just me and Lynn. So technically we didn’t start the blog together, but we do blog together. Since we love all things bookish, having a space to share our reviews and interact with other bookworms is a blast.
Lynn: I never actually had plans to blog. I thought this would be temporary, while I filled in for Julie and Rose when their lives became too busy. But now it’s been a year, and here I am, still blogging! And really enjoying it!
Q2: Who does most of the post writing?
Julie: We pretty much split it up. We each write book reviews, I tend to do mine on Mondays and she does them Fridays. Then we have several posts that we write together, so both our thoughts are in one post. These are the discussion posts such as Chat Between Chapters and our #ShelfLove Challenge updates. I do pretty much all of the author appearance/guest posts here, but that isn’t really post writing as much as putting together the information and scheduling the post.
Lynn: We do split up most of the writing – with shared posts and our own posts. Julie is much better at setting up the posts. I bat cleanup, finishing and scheduling posts. Plus, I’m becoming an expert at making bingo cards!
Q3: Is it easier generating content when there’s two of you?
Julie: YES! OMG Lynn does a lot of homework for us and comes up with great ideas for our upcoming Chat Between Chapters topics. We like to meet (sometimes even for a fun lunch at a local restaurant) to just generate topic ideas and plan out the next month or two of posts.
Lynn: Definitely YES! It’s great to have someone else to bounce ideas off of. Or read a review when you know something is missing, but not exactly sure what that missing thing is. I don’t think I’d want to blog alone!
Q4: Who does what with social media, who are we talking to each day?
Julie: We have our own twitter accounts, but we are both admins on the Facebook page. So on twitter, you know which one of us you’re chatting with. Then on Facebook, you might be seeing our own posts auto-shared or some cool other book related posts that either of us shared on the page. I try to remember to add my name at the end of comments and posts I make that are questions or chatty in nature outside of sharing links.
Lynn: Julie is a lot better with social media than I am. I prefer twitter, but can’t seem to find the time in the day to read all that stuff. We both post fun stuff to our Facebook page. But thankfully, most of our posts are automatic.
Q5: If you’re gifted anything or approached by brands, who gets first dibs?
Julie: In the book blog world we don’t really get involved with “brands”, but authors and publishers. We pretty much request our own ARCs if we want them, so I don’t think we’ve really come across a situation where we have one item that we’re both fighting over. At one time Rose and I both got a review copy of a book and did a joint review, and being on the mailing list from that project I was invited to request to review the next book. I didn’t have time so I passed that opportunity onto Lynn. I’m sure Rose would have received the same opportunity.
Lynn: True, I don’t think we’ve had a situation where we were fighting over a book. We can easily review the same books.
Q6: Do you ever argue about content?
Julie: I don’t think we ever have. We have our own ideas and we enjoy putting them together to write good posts. We each are welcome and able to write about whatever we want that relates to our niche. We’re just having fun here and making new friends who love books as much as we do.
Lynn: I’m pretty easy-going, so I’d have to agree with Julie. There hasn’t been a time where I remember that we’ve argued about content. I think that’s what is good about our blog. We have our own ideas, and blend them together.
Alrighty, this was fun! Now to pass the tag on, we are tagging the hooligans at the Platypire Reviews blog! They run a group book blog – there are so many members! We know two of them personally from a different book club. Not all the platypires have to answer the questions tag, though 😉
Three, actually. *cough* We convinced Bekah to join. She is the hoodlum who has been coming with me to the last few book clubs I’ve attended.
More hooligans!