Just Curious

Being gone for so long I'm left somewhat confused at times and still out of the loop at other times.

This week Rosie blogged about editorial and opinion blog posts over on Access Romance.  My comment was "There’s not much out there that I’d be willing to wade into. There’s more important things in life to worry about."  I see most of the attention getting issues as tempests in teacups, and someone else usually posts my thoughts on a subject and probably better than I would have :)  .

I came across a few things over the last few days that I wasn't really "willing to wade into", but I did have some thoughts about, so I'm going to comment here instead :)

1. Advertising--if you reach the point where advertising is needed to keep your blog afloat, you have probably ceased being a simple reader blog and have morphed into more of an industry one.  This isn't a bad transition for people who have made this their work, part time, full time.  It takes real dedication to move from a reading hobby to being part of the industry.  Advertising is great, but it needs to be separate from commentary.  There's a credibility issue.  And to be perfectly honest, I never notice the advertising--that's probably not such a good thing or maybe it is--I'm not sure, I'll have to think about it--someother time ;)
2. Yesterday I stumbled upon the "petition" from last year.  Wow, I truly missed a big brouhaha with that one--LOL, Nobody likes criticism (myself included), the initial reaction is usually to be defensive--I always hate myself later, whenver I do this. What I found interesting was the shock and disbelief that went with an author behaving badly over a review, even to this extreme and this was frightening in the extreme.  This type of behavior has been going on forever.  Authors behave badly, readers react and the mean girls on all sides come crawling out of the woodwork.  This happens on the blogs now, the message boards of a few years ago, book reviews in magazines and newspapers have you ever read some of the letters to the editors?  There are crazy people in the world--and they all have opinions.  There will always be fans that feed the egos of authors and we need to remember there are fans of blogs that can be just as ugly.  It is what it is--a sad part of human nature.
3. Plagiarism--what the heck?  Don't authors realize, especially in this digitial age, that they're going to be eventually caught??

I'm off my soap box--have a great day, I've got a book to read :)