Escape In A Book's 1 year blogoversary(+a little giveaway)

How time flies! I cannot believe that Escape In A Book has been around the book blogosfere a whole year already. It started out as a place where I could write about the books that I read and share my thoughts with others. I don't really have all that many friends who reads, at least not the same genres as me, although I have a wonderful younger sister who shares my taste in books. The past year I have met so many wonderful people from all over the world that shares my passion for reading. Sadly I've been neglecting my wonderful book blogging friends for a little while now and that makes me feel guilt, like I'm letting my friends down but I'll make up for it once my exams are over and done with. I want to thank each and everyone of my regular followers, readers and commenter's, you have all been a great help to make this blog what it is today.

Here are some of the key things I've learned this past year:

• I have worked on my writing skills and I believe that my English vocabulary is greatly improved, but I still have much to learn!

• I have learned many of the blogging communities do's and don'ts, thanks to great book bloggers like The Story Siren, Persnickety Snark, Presenting Lenore and Today's Adventure just to name a few.

• I took a chance and asked an author for an interview, it's actually not dangerous!
• I've learned more HTML than I ever thought possible for me, thanks to blogs like The Neverending Shelf and Parajunkee Design.
  

Now it's time for a short recap of the year that has passed:

My first post(and my first review) ever was posted on May 15th 2009 and was a review of The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. I love that book and if you haven't read it yet I would recommend that you do.

The first comment I ever received was on a post titled 2009 Young Adult Challenge and the commenter was the one and only J. Kaye, who sadly has stopped book blogging(but you can still follow her in her writing progress over at her new blog 365 Days of Novel Writing). That was also the first challenge I ever entered, it were also the only challenge I've finished. I think I have learned a lesson about challenges through this first year of blogging, at this stage challenges aren't for me and I'm going to stop entering them.


I hosted my very first contest to celebrate the YA Carnival, a little over a month after I first started blogging. All of my contests have been(and will continue to be) international thanks to the fact that I discovered The Book Depository(I think Alaine or Teddyree is to be credited for that). The store has free shipping to over 90 countries, that was the commercial of today(just too bad that I don't get paid) ;) The reason for my pimping TBD is of course due to the fact that I would like more international contests in the book blogosfere since I live in Norway myself.

Not long ago I did my very first author interview with the wonderful A.S. Peterson, he is the author of one of my favorite books, The Fiddler's Gun. I personally thought it was a good interview. I spent a lot of time pondering and researching before conducting the interview. I wanted to ask relevant questions, questions that that the author hadn't have to answer before.
Well I had done a few things ready for this post in advance and one was the most commented post.. now sadly a large part of my comments are all gone due to my change of commenting platform. My most commented post was originally a Waiting on Wednesday post with 33 comments, my choice of book was The Thief Taker's Apprentice by Stephen Deas. Of the posts that still have the comments intact it was a Booking Through Thursday post with 32 comments. The posts topic were 15 books you have read that will always stick with you. Other than that I've had posts withs hundreds of comments but that has been contests so they don't count in the same way.

The lovely Teddyree from The Eclectic Reader honored me with my very first award, for me it felt like receiving an Oscar.

This first year I've chanced layout a couple of times and I've had three different commenting platforms. Which sadly resulted in several hundred comments lost the last time I changed platform(luckily I'm still able to read them in my dashbord over at Disqus).

Last word of advice to new bloggers:
Remember blogging is not a popularity contest, just be yourself, the readers will come to you in time. I felt a bit like it was a contest in the beginning but I have learned that the readers you want are those who follow you because of what you read and write(not because you throw the biggest contests).

After I'd been blogging for about 10 months I started to get a few review requests from publishers and authors outside of Norway. That is great fun and I feel grateful that people feel that my opinion might help to promote their books. That being said I would like to say to new bloggers that receiving books for review is an obligation, so I would advise you to only accept the books that you really want read. If the publisher just sent you a book without asking, it is of course a different matter, but if you were asked and you accepted a request it is expected that you follow through with a review(or some kind of post at least).

For those of you who went through all the trouble and read this entire post, here's your chance to a special treat. Open for all, there might be more than one winner ;) Ends June 15th: