On Reworking Once Upon a Bookcase - Inspired by Lucy of Queen of Contemporary

Lucy of Queen of Contemporary has posted on her BookTube channel a video, Be the Change You Want to See, about the direction she's now going to go in with her channel. With Lucy's permission, here is her video:


I'm not a BookTuber, but you don't need to be to be inspired by this video. Lucy has really got me thinking about content and originality. She talks about how she wants to use her channel to talk more about books rather than just hauls, etc, and how she wants to talk about diversity and other important topics.

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Changes to Once Upon a Bookcase

I love blogging, you all know this, but I love doing other things too. I have been finding lately that with the things that go on behind the scenes, what my readers don't see, is eating into a lot of my time, and I just don't have any over for the other things I like to do.

I have decided to try and greatly reduce the time spent on blogging admin - reading and responding to emails, the things I agree to, etc. This mostly won't affect you, readers, it mostly affects the publicists etc. that  contact me, but there will be changes:

• Once Upon a Bookcase will be taking part in fewer blog tours. 
• Weekly Gossip posts will continue to reveal covers and trailers, but the rest of the news will be things I'm interested in, rather than everything I get emailed about that is relevant to YA and/or fantasy.

It doesn't sound like much, but the time I normally spend on these things can take a few hours a week what with the various emails, getting images, formatting the posts. The time instead will be spent on doing other things I enjoy - perhaps even more reading, as I'm pretty sure I spend more time in a day sat in front of the computer rather than actually reading. If you're interested in the other changes I'm making that affect publicists/publishers/PR people - or if you actually are one - please read my Review Policy, which has just been updated.

Thanks for reading and understanding.

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It's Not Personal, But Should it Be?

I have been thinking over the last few days about possibly making the blog a little more personal. Pretty much all of my posts are in someway related to books, and that's fine, that's what a book blog is mainly for. However, I've just been wondering whether or not my readers felt they knew me at all. You know I can get really gushy about books I love, and that I can be passionate about certain topics because of the themed months, but about me?

So I thought I'd ask you. Do you think you know me? Would you like to see an addition of personal posts, or keep it strictly book related? Are you not bothered either way? If you would like to see personal posts, what are the kind of things you'd like to see?

Also, while I'm here, what do you think of vlogs? I've finally worked out how to work my inbuilt webcam, and have been toying with the idea of vlogging IMM (and possibly event reports, because I just can't write them up. I can go on and on about them verbally, but writing doesn't seem to work for me). Would this appeal or not? And does anyone know of some good, reliable free video editing software I can download? Because I know I'll screw it up :) Thanks for your thoughts!

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