Category: blog news

Hi everyone! Sorry for the long post, but I need your input. Because I value your opinions, I’ll be giving away a $25 Amazon gift card to one of the kind people who manage to wade through the jabbering ahead and give me some feedback in the comments or through the contact form (button in upper right, below search bar). I’ll be taking comments through midnight Thursday (April 21).

The SGSF blog is now nine months old (yay!) and as the one year mark looms, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of the blog. In many ways the blog, or your response to it, has exceeded my expectations. Thank you!

I had two goals when I started:

1. I wanted to connect with other SF, SFR, and PNR fans. I feel like I’m doing pretty good there. It is hard to be sure how many regular readers are out there, but (based on page views and subscribers) I’m guessing more than 50 and less than 100. Some of you have become friends and feel like kindred spirits. My life is enriched just knowing all of you are out there. I also feel like I get a fair amount of interactivity and conversation going on here and to me that is an essential part of making that connection—so thank you for commenting!
2. I also wanted to pull together the world of SF media and the world of SFR and PNR novels. Maybe cross-pollinate a bit.  I know there are some of you out there from each of these worlds, but you’ll have to let me know if this sort of blend is working for you. I also know the blog is getting a good number of hits based on internet searches, so the reach of the blog is going beyond word of mouth. I just don’t know how many of those searchers are sticking around and becoming regular readers.

So, I’d love to hear how you found the blog and technical things that are working or not working for you. You may have noticed I’ve been playing around with the look and operation of the blog. It is far from settled, so please weigh in. Especially on the subject of showing full posts or partial posts. I will always make full posts available for feed readers and email subscribers, but for those of you who visit the site, does full vs partial make a difference? Do you hate having to click through or do you like being able to choose from several posts?

And what do you think of the new odds and ends posts? The new template let’s me add these brief posts with links to other content I think you might like to know about. I used to save these up for the Potpourri posts. I like getting them to you right away and I think the new way is good for site visitors, but I’m worried those frequent super short posts might be annoying for subscribers.

Content-wise, I’ve been doing less author interviews and guest blogs than I’d originally planned. I really want to do more of this, but more importantly,  I’d like to hear what you’d like to see (or see more of) on the blog.

I’d also like to know how you all feel about the name of the blog. It is not exactly as catchy as I’d like, but it was the best I could come up with at the time.

Finally, I’ve noticed lately that I’m having two time management issues. First, I’m not reading and commenting on as many new SFR releases as I’d like and second, it has gotten harder for me to participate in conversations on some of your blogs. I do check in and read, but sometimes I decline to comment because I know I won’t be able to follow the conversation. I really hate this. I think the only solution is to this might be to make this a group blog. Maybe recruit a few people to do regular “columns” like a SFR reviewer, an SF movie reviewer, someone to talk about comics or games. Do you think this would change the nature of the blog too much? Or ramp up the fun?

I hope you’ll comment on any or all of the questions jammed into this rambling post. Thanks so much for being a part of the SGSF blog!