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| A great year for books, without a doubt (once again thanks to Jonathan Emmett for designing our Campaign Logo) |
Our campaign to encourage mums and dads to read to their children more, was something that lots of wonderful people got involved with, supported and got behind. In our various theme weeks we always got some brilliant feedback, and of course best of all some brilliant suggestions for books we might have missed in each category.
It was hard though at times, and you can probably see that if you skip through the blog and look at weeks where we managed one post on the subject, and then time and real life got in the way. The best thing about doing a book blog part time is also the worst thing. You're not doing it as a full-time concern, therefore you never have time to become disillusioned, jaded or fed up with reading and reviewing children's books.
But you don't do it full time, and that means that squeezing in blog posts, book coverage - even networking with other wonderful book blogging folk, authors, illustrators and publishers, is something that we really didn't have nearly enough time to do in 2013 (note to self, it's something for tomorrow's new year's resolutions).
On the wonderful occasions where we did get the chance to meet fab booky folk, we had a lot of fun. We did our first 'read out loud' session at Mostly Books (and that's definitely something that we can't wait to do again in 2014) and we met the wonderful folk behind CApptivated Kids, Playing By the Book, The Little Wooden Horse and Taking Words for a Stroll (otherwise known as Helen, Zoe, Polly and Ellie!) who are brilliant and wonderful and we hope to meet many more of you lovely blogging types in the new year too.
So was our campaign a success? I'd like to think we made a bit of fuss and noise about the subject, and perhaps through the blog and through surreptitiously sidling up to folk in our local library and suggesting books they might like to read, or seeing people in bookshops and showing them brilliant books we've loved and they might love to, we might've just scratched the surface.
Next year, the blog will change a bit. Charlotte will be more the focus of the blog and we're cooking up all sorts of new ways to make the voice you hear in the blog more hers than mine (though dad might still chip in from time to time, of course). We'll be cutting out app coverage entirely, and concentrating more on the books we love, and though there may be fewer reviews we're hoping that they're going to be longer - and perhaps more worthy of the subject we're covering.
We'll still have all the fun stuff, we'll still be supporting indies, and we'll still probably choose a book of the week each week (though it's getting more and more difficult to choose just one, they're just too durned good!)
We'd like to thank everyone who sent us lovely things to review, and we look forward to catching up with you all in the new year. We might have to scale back what we do a little bit but we'll always be looking for ways to promote child literacy, get kids interested in stories and of course keep adults reading to their kids too!
