Misrule Comments and Readership

I'm going to copy a comment I received on my last post in full here, because it will direct you to some interesting sites (and I am not sure if anyone reads the comments if they haven't posted one themselves).

The poster is one of my North American readers, Jen Robinson:

Thanks for the thought-provoking post, Judith. I'm not sure if you've seen this, but Anne Boles Levy actually just spoke at a KidLit Blogger Conference last weekend on the need for children's book bloggers to write "better" reviews (in the sense of adhering to the conventions of reviewing). Her comments were very well received, though she didn't have time to go into the depth that she would have liked (she also writes reviews for the LA Times). Anne posted about her session here.

Another thing that came out of the conference was a plan (admittedly still in the brainstorming stage) to provide some sort of portal for people looking for children's and young adult book blogs. One function that this portal might serve is help lend authority to the sites that are very focused on, and good at, reviewing. Because I completely agree with your point that it's hard for someone not familiar with book reviews to know what to look for, and how to judge what they find, among the many sites out there.

Thanks for an interesting discussion. I plan to link to this post today.

Which she did—thanks, Jen! Do also read Jen's post on "Promoting the KidLitosphere" here. I'm not a fan of terms like "kidlit" (and even worse, "kiddielit—yech!), which I see as reductionist of the genre, but leaving that aside, Jen's post is terrific and offers some very practical ideas about promoting the resource that is blogs dedicated to children's books, and also offering a way for non-specialist readers to determine the authority of the blog—which is something I talked about on the "Uses of Blogging" post.

And do read Ann Boles Levy's post from the conference, which Jen links to and to which I am going link to again in case you missed it the first time.

Now, as for who is reading this blog—apparently I am averaging 4000 hits per day. Yes—4000! Now, this includes the Misrule website, not just the blog, where my review of Deadly, Unna? appears to be a favourite hit. I'm not all that clear on the difference between "hits" and "pages", etc, but 4000 a day in any terms is amazing—and kinda scary!

Here's a graph that might give you a picture: