10 Year Blogiversary Celebration!

Happy 10 Years, BookCrushin!

Sometimes, we look back at our lives and wonder if we left a mark, if anyone will remember us…and most of the times, I think back on my passion and where the book life has taken me. To be honest, it has taken me on many adventures…in my brain and in the real world.

When I think of how books put worlds and words into our lives, it can be remarkable, and one book really holds some of this magic with me and that is VE Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue – so if you read this post to the end, you’ll find a giveaway for an out of print special anniversary edition and more, to celebrate leaving your mark on this world.

Wow, I never would have thought this blog would be here 10 years after our launch! We technically launched on August 20th 2012. We revamped about a year later to an updated wordpress format and did a major redesign in 2018. Sounds like we are about due for another big shake up.

Kelly will be doing some reminiscing so if you’re into that, read on!

(10 years gif from Grosse Point Blank movie)

So if you didn’t know us at our origin, here are some interesting tidbits.

Passion:
We were originally a very active book club group on goodreads that started around 2009, and two things occurred that motivated us to switch to a public blog. First, we read a book we loved, and helped with a campaign another (now defunct) blog started to help drum up some viral support to help the author get a contract to finish the trilogy! We saw that the blog had more permanent platform which gave them the ability to share and organize their readers and provide support for the book! And after that, my best friend in real life was moving across the country, and we thought this was a way to work together and keep us connected even though we were 1000+ miles apart.

Firsts:
Some of our first posts were book club discussion guides to help discuss books we read, as we were just merging away from the book club into more possibilities. My first post was a playlist I created for Kiersten White’s Paranormalcy series which had just published the final book of the trilogy. I would link it, but the plugin we used back then for a playlist doesn’t exist anymore.

Christy’s first post was technically a joint review we did for Ashley Poston’s Geekerella in 2017! Then like half a year goes by and her next post was a guest review, where she covered for me when I got sick and had a blog tour review date, and luckily for me she read the book and we posted her review. We decided a little after that she should just join me on this wild blogging journey.

We even had our instagram for the last 10yrs too! Hard to imagine! But we mostly posted promo items, book cover images from publishers, and images the blog was using for giveaways and such. I deleted or archived all those posts when I started getting active again a little over 7yrs ago. Right around that time, was when I made so many of my closest book friends from the booksta community. 2016 was really magical time for booksta. It is also when I started buying a ridiculous amount of books! Yes, I blame the booksta aesthetic for my physical book collecting problems, don’t you?

Relaunch:
In 2018, we relaunched with a new site look, logo, and of course my new co-blogger Christy, and we would not have made it the last 5 yrs without her!

Now:
As I write this post we have published over 3100 blog posts! Which means we post on average 310xs a year! That’s a lot of book promotion. I feel like we deserve a raise! Oh wait, we do this for free, we don’t even serve you ads on our blog…just some handy Bookshop referral links to buy some books, or if you love what we’ve done in the past 10yrs, you can buy us a coffee!

In 2020 we launched a post, to help readers find signed books during the pandemic, that has since become a static page, and our most viewed resource on the blog. I have always loved promoting authors, and meeting authors, so this brought two of my passions to an intersection, that is clearly a valued resource to the bookish community. 55% of our traffic is to this page still and I love being able to provide this kind of round up of signed books & preorder incentives for everyone to buy (I receive no incentives for doing this kind of work (except buy more books than I should be) – but clearly it is needed resource! ).

So yeah, to celebrate our love of authors and signed books, below check out a slideshow of just a small fraction of some of the authors Christy and I met since 2016, and even some cons we did together! As you can see, I usually just photo the authors, and skip myself in the pics, but I tried to find some for prosperity.

It’s Major Award:

Some of our achievements and accomplishments in no real order, just things we love and find braggable for a post like this.

#CoverCrush was one of our first weekly memes – we created very early as it was part of our naming concept back 2012, we had a lot of ‘crush’ type posts – but this one had staying power, cause who doesn’t love a good cover! This is probably our most renowned part of our history as we still post it almost regularly, and have over 345 posts on the blog. Which it also grew into a social media hashtag bigger than us, even major publishers use it.

We have over 650 reviews posted on the blog! That is a huge number especially since I hate writing reviews. (Shrug emoji) You better believe this was why we brought in so many reviewers to be a part of the blog in the past – I thank you all, we’ve had 5 additional people officially as reviewers, and we couldn’t have done it without their reviews over the past 10 years.

#SignedBookSundays was first created as a hashtag on instagram in 2016 to give myself something to post other than #socksunday (how I loathed this meme then was absurd), but it is what brought me and Christy closer together chatting on instagram. She used the hashtag, and was the first person other than myself, so clearly it got us in each other DMs. Eventually, Christy and I turned it into a monthly challenge back in 2017, and then the pandemic stressors crashed the challenge in 2020, but many of us still use the hashtag, and for us, we turned it into a monthly wrap up feature on the blog.

To be blurbed!

As team BookCrushin have been blurbed on at least 4 traditionally published books (that I can recall off the top of my head) and a few indies as well! This is no small feat! Most blurbs are used in marketing and ARC printed copies, not many are in finished products, that space is saved for bestsellers to help sell a book. We have also been thanked in quite a few books’ acknowledgements and well that too is extremely special! Do you read the acknowledgements? Because if an author knows us well enough by name, and we find ourselves a spot in the acknowledgements, that means we have worked our asses off helping that author & book. Which is the best compliment after all the time and passion we put into this book world.

Press? Like a Reporter?

We have been invited as press to cover major events like BookExpo, BookCon, SDCC, NYCC, SVCC, YallWest & YallFest.

Christy is an expert moderator and interviewer – she has countless events under her belt and I can claim only 3. I am more of a participant or attendee, than the mod, but the 3 events I led have been some of my most cherished memories.

I did the EpicReads #EpicPride tour stop at Barnes & Noble, as well as launched Ivory & Bone sequel Obsidian & Stars with local author Julie Eshbaugh, and was on a YA Blogger Panel for B&N Teen Fest, that one time way back when…

Giveaway:

To enter just leave us some comment love below to enter! (please input into the box the email address we can contact you back from – do not put your email in the body of the comment, please).

US/PR:

1- OOP Signed Anniversary UK edition of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by VE Schwab ($100 retail value!)
1- etsy giftcard or selected Addie LaRue merch ($25 value)

INTL:

1- reprinted anniversary UK edition of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by VE Schwab (ships from Blackwell’s or Book Depository – or $30 GC value)