Armchair BEA – Wrap Up

Posted by Charleen on June 2, 2013
Posted in: Armchair BEA, Blogging. Tagged: , .

beasmAs you know, I’ve been participating in Armchair BEA all this past week. Today’s the final day, which means it’s time to wrap things up.

 
Cheap Thrills Recap

First, a quick list of links, in case you missed any of my earlier posts:

I skipped “Keeping It Real” because it felt too similar to “Blogger Development.” Maybe it’s the other side of development… maintaining a balance between growing your blog but without compromising yourself. However you read it, I just didn’t feel like I had anything to add here.

I also didn’t do a giveaway. For some reason I was thinking that Giveaway Day was for official giveaways, not for us to host our own. Clearly I had that wrong. I do think it would be fun to host a giveaway in the future. Maybe I’ll do one for my blogiversary… and by having it not during a big blogger event, that makes it more likely that one of my regular readers will be the winner, and I like that idea better anyway.

I also skipped the “Genres: What Did We Miss?” link up… but more on that later.

 
Around the Blogosphere

A big part of Armchair BEA is connecting with other bloggers, so here’s a small sampling of blogs I visited and posts I enjoyed this week:

I also have to give a couple special shoutouts. One is to a former co-worker I reconnected with through Armchair BEA: Chris at WildmooBooks.

The second is to Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness. “I Want to Help You Read More Nonfiction” is probably the most original and helpful post I saw all week. As wary as I am of personal recommendations (both giving and receiving them) I thought this was fantastic, way better (though taking much more effort) than a simple list of favorites.

 
Surprise Topic

Imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning and, instead of linking my wrap-up post which was all ready to go, I discovered a new daily topic, one that wasn’t mentioned on the agenda. Not only was I not expecting this topic — Genres: What Did We Miss? — but I don’t really think it’s needed. All of the topics this week were so broad that I don’t see how one could consider anything missed. If you really wanted to talk about something, wouldn’t you have found a way to incorporate it?

The only posts I’m seeing that wouldn’t really fit in either the genre, literary, or nonfiction posts are new adult (possibly could have gone in with a discussion about YA, and the differences between the two) and graphic novels (okay, I’ll admit it, this one really wouldn’t have fit anywhere).

Maybe instead of “Genres We Missed” this post could have been for “Topics We Missed,” opening it up to anything bloggers wanted to discuss. Because I can understand the frustration of wanting to share something and not having anywhere to fit in. I guess if the topic was on the agenda from the start, I wouldn’t be so confused.

 
Looking Ahead

While the posts on blogging were interesting topics, a lot of the posts were looking very similar; I enjoyed seeing other bloggers’ responses to the reading-focused prompts a lot more. Maybe next year, if they keep the same format, I’ll stick to the reading posts. On the other hand, in a year I might have more to say on the blogger topics.

At any rate, I’ll definitely be participating again in the future, in some form or another.

 
Wrapping Up the Wrap Up

Overall I thought Armchair BEA was a fun experience. Thanks to all of my wonderful commenters! It makes me all the more guilty that I wasn’t as active on other blogs as I would have liked… I’m still sort of recovering from overextending myself during Bout of Books. But it’s been really great having more discussion around here than I’m used to.

Did you enjoy Armchair BEA? What was your favorite part?

14 comments on “Armchair BEA – Wrap Up”

  1. Thank you for the mention of my post! It was a lot of work, but I think more fun for me to do than trying to narrow down a list of favorites, especially since I have a very particular taste in nonfiction that isn’t close to universal.

    I think I was more interested in the blogging posts rather than the book posts. We all write about books most of the time, it was nice to spend some time writing and thinking about blogging more broadly. I got some good tips and some good book recommendations from the week.

    • I liked some of the blogger discussion, but I think I might have liked it better as a Twitter chat, or something where we could have an actual *discussion* about it, instead of a hundred blog posts that all say the same — or very similar — things. I just liked that the book posts (with the exception of maybe classics) had a lot more variety.

      And yes, your post was fantastic. I’d love it if something like that could be incorporated into Armchair BEA officially… I don’t know how they’d do it without it being totally overwhelming for a handful of people, but it seems like so many people visit the bookish posts looking to expand their TBR, it would be nice to have that personal touch.

  2. Oh my goodness, I know what you mean. I have never been so busy with blog-stuff as this past week. And I know I probably missed commenting on some blogs, because there were just so many great posts out there. I espeically liked the different book-related posts, too. More so than developing and things. I won’t really mind if my blog stays the way it is right now :)

    Thanks for stopping by my Armchair BEA wrapup post earlier.

    • I started out strong, and then as the week went by it just got harder to keep up. I’ve been able to keep up on responding to comments here, but very little other than that. Thanks for reading!

  3. Oh, thanks for the mention!

    As far as commenting goes, I made it a point to visit about five posts every day and comment on at least one or two of them. That way, I knew I was reaching a little bit without being overwhelmed. And several days I did end up visiting more blogs than that.

    It did seem like a lot of the blogging posts got the same sort of responses, especially the ethics ones (really, though, how else is anyone going to respond?). But overall, I thought it was a lot of fun this year–last year I kind of hung around the outskirts and didn’t interact much.

    • That sounds like a much more reasonable goal than the one I set for myself during my last blogger event… which is why I was too burned out to do as much as I would have liked for this one. As for the blogging posts, I think I liked reading some of the comments more than the posts… seems like that’s where some of the best discussions were happening. Thanks for stopping by!

  5. This is fantastic feedback. Thank you so much for sharing. I really like the idea of having a “what topics did we miss” open mic type topic for next year. As Armchair gets bigger it is difficult to try and make it diverse enough for everyone but not overwhelming. But, we will keep trying to make it even better.

    • I don’t envy you.

      One other thing that might be nice for future events is some way to connect bloggers with similar interests… a lot of what I was seeing on the “what did we miss” posts were, not necessarily that the blogger writing it couldn’t have talked about it earlier, but that they didn’t see as much discussion about it as they would have liked on *other* blogs. But then, how do you connect like-minded bloggers without it turning cliquey?

      Thanks for stopping by!

  6. I’m with you on what genres did we miss post. Luckily, the first responder put (world lit) in her link and of course I knew I had to do that too! Nice to meet you! It was my first time doing ABEA and had a blast.

    • Both the topic and the formatting seemed to throw a lot of people off, and then there were others who just used the linky for their wrap-up post. I think it just caused a lot of confusion because it was unexpected. Oh well. Thanks for reading!

  7. I can kind of relate from over-extending for Bout of Books. I kept trying to tag Armchair posts with the Bout of Books hashtag on twitter and laughing at myself.

    I felt the opposite, and that I had more to say on the blogging topics than the genres. That is at least partly because I don’t pay much attention to genre when I am reading. I look forward to next year when I can go deeper with some of the topics.

    • Ha! I almost did that once, but caught myself. And it’s not so much that *I* didn’t have anything to say on the blogging topics (I sort of felt like I didn’t, because I’m so new, but then those posts ended up longer than my genre ones), but it just got old reading everyone’s posts because it seemed like most of us were saying pretty much the same thing. Thanks for stopping by!

Comments are closed.