Armchair BEA: Nurturing Blogging Relationships

A big thanks to Epic Book Nerd for helping me figure out about Armchair BEA!!!! She was so sweet and gave me all the info I needed over Twitter. You rock girl! :)

So this is gonna be my first Armchair BEA post! Todays topic is about nurturing book blogger relationships.

I'm not gonna lie book blogging relationships kind of scare me. I know it sounds kind of stupid. How can you be scared of connecting with people through email or Twitter? Haha well this is my thought process:

My Rational Voice: "Oh wow I love this persons blog! They seem so cool. Maybe I should drop them and email and tell them!"

My Irrational Voice: "Who are you kidding?! They might think you're a creeper..... Best to just be safe and admire from afar."

I know its really dumb. Haha. I really need to get over this completely stupid and irrational fear. So because of this post I'm going to challenge myself to reach out to 4 different bloggers that I really admire this month. Nothing like getting rid of a fear by facing it right? :)

In the meantime I'll tell you guys about one particular blogger that I do interact with! The awesome Izzy from My Words Ate Me reached out to me a couple months ago and we've been emailing ever since! We're both half Chinese and like really similar things and she's just plain awesome. She is an aspiring writer and she writes the most hilarious posts over on her blog so you should totally check her out!

So for me this whole relationship thing doesn't come easy. I don't have a "winning formula" for connecting with other bloggers or publishers. In fact I haven't even reached out to any publishers because I promised myself I wouldn't ask for any ARC's until I had been blogging for 6 months. Pretty crazy but true. :P My only suggestions to other bloggers is that if you never reach out then you'll never build anything special. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there! That's how you make friends in real life and blogging is no different. Clearly I am still learning this lesson. Haha.

Hope you guys are having an awesome day! Have any tips for me when it comes to reaching out to other bloggers or publishers?

Julia :)