Arse Up? Am I doing it backwards?

Disclaimer:

This article is not intended to devalue the promotional material that should always accompany any book related blog content.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m new to blogging. I’ve read a few articles and I’ve checked out various other blogs as my interest has been peaked (usually by a rather clever tweet). What I’ve seen with the exception of a few cases, is that we all seem to follow the same format.

Book reviews, cover reveals, teasers, guest posts and interviews generally consist of:

• The book details (Title, Author, Publisher)
• The book cover
• The summary
• Purchase details
• Maybe an excerpt
• The author photo
• The author bio
• The author contacts (Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Website)

Whatever item you, yourself are hosting, the original content that you provide is often inserted somewhere after the summary. So I find myself wondering whenever I write a review, am I better off my placing my content first? It’s not selfishness that makes me question this, but it does occur to me, especially for new releases that all that stuff we place above our own thoughts, reviews, questions and comments... it’s stuff people have read before! 

This leads me to ask two questions...

Am I losing my audience as they skim through the promotional collateral to get to my content?

As a blogger, where my ideas are essentially the point of the blogging exercise, why am I not leading with my content first?

If my review is positive, then I would hope my words are enough to convince the reader to continue on to the book details. In fact, I think a real measure of success would be to convince a reader to reconsider an author they had previously sworn off. I could write the best tweets to lead you to my blog, but if, when you get there the first thing you saw was a cover for an author you didn’t like... would you even scroll down to my content?

Soooo... for the next little while, I’m going to shake up the format, I might even lead with the dreaded ratings! Who knows? Maybe I’ll like the results? Maybe you’ll like the results? It’s like Sheldon’s “anything can happen Thursday”, but not? (Big Bang Theory)

xD

Credit to:
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