WINNING TEMPLATE
Nicky Pellegrino writes on the joys of book blogging
- Herald on Sunday 28 February.

At 6am pretty much every morning Graham Beattie heads to the office he’s set up in the basement of his Ponsonby townhouse and starts to blog about books. His daily posts are read by people from the US to the Ukraine, and beattiesbookblog.blogspot.com has become required reading for many in the book industry.
“Blogging is basically my fulltime job,” admits Beattie, “although of course it doesn’t pay me anything.”

The former publisher and bookseller might never have started blogging if it hadn’t been for a book review he did for Radio New Zealand that was cut short due to lack of time.
“It was for a Martin Amis novel called House of Meetings which was the grimmest book I’d ever read,” he recalls. “I only got two minutes to talk about it and felt short-changed because there was a lot I wanted to say. So I decided to publish the material somewhere else, although I wasn’t quite sure where.”

It was Beattie’s nephew who suggested he try blogging. So he logged on to Google and by the end of the day had his first, albeit fairly basic, page online.
“About 20 minutes later someone commented on the post and by the end of the day it’d had five hits,” Beattie says ‘I thought, wow people are actually finding this and reading it.”
That was in October 2006. These days the blog gets between eight to ten thousand hits a week and has followers as notable as Keri Hulme and CK Stead. What began as a very personal reading diary has become more of a news gathering exercise, with Beattie starting his day searching through the websites of UK and US newspapers and pulling out items of interest (he avoids copyright strife by linking back to the original source).

“Virtually every bookseller, publisher and librarian in New Zealand reads my blog almost every day,” he says. “They tell me it’s the first thing they do every morning when they get into work.”
So far Beattie has resisted the lure of advertising as he fears it might compromise his independence so the hours he spends on his blog each day are purely for love not profit.
“I get a huge buzz out of it,” he explains. “My wife would tell you I’m obsessed. But if I’m reading a good book or I’m in a wonderful bookshop somewhere in the world then I want to write about.”
There are some perks. As his fame has spread publishers have begun sending Beattie review copies of books. “I’d probably spend about $3,000 a year on them otherwise,” he admits. He also gets into book festivals for free. But his main motivation is to encourage others to share his passion for reading, to sell more books and send more people to libraries.

Book blogging is, of course, a worldwide phenomenon with sites devoted to any genre you care to mention. By far the most enthusiastic book bloggers are often the authors themselves. Dunedin crime writer Vanda Symon has one, so does Rachael King and Peter Wells. In fact, here in New Zealand there’s an online community of writers, supporting each other and sharing experiences, according to Wellington novelist Mary McCallum.

McCallum is the author of the Montana Award winning The Blue and of a blog named O Audacious Book (mary-mccallum.blogspot.com). Like many Kiwi writers she was propelled into an online presence thanks to the NZ Book Month website which carries guests blogs from authors.
“It was a fantastic experience writing one, really useful and interesting,” she says. “It gave me an opportunity to write in essay form but with more immediacy and I liked the idea of talking directly to the book reading public.”

While tempted to establish her own blog, McCallum was concerned it would be too time-consuming. Then friends started sending her photographs of her novel The Blue in different locations around the world and she decided it would be fun to post them online.
Since she began O Audacious Book in April 2008 McCallum has enjoyed sharing her opinion on literature along with thoughts about writing and its challenges. She points out that authors often don’t garner much attention in the periods between books so this is a way for her to maintain a presence while she works on her fiction. She also appreciates being able to promote New Zealand writing and explore things she’s interested in without worrying about who will publish them.
“I’ve discovered I find blogging a good warm up for writing,” says McCallum. “I enjoy polishing up an online essay because it helps the brain keep going for fiction writing.”

For Aucklander Ngaire Atmore book-blogging is part of a small business she runs outside of her job in advertising. She shares her opinions on the books she’s been reading on her blog www.bookiemonster.co.nz and she and her partner also sell a mix of new and second-hand books on trademe.
“My ideal job would involve being paid to read the books I love but strangely enough there didn’t seem to be many jobs like that going,” says Atmore. “So I decided to create my own version of that.”
The fun of it, she explains, is being involved in an alternative book community. “Plus you get a sense of achievement from seeing your writing published – even if it’s you doing the publishing! And as more people start reading your site and responding to you, it just gets better,” says Atmore.
Her blog is a mix of her own opinions, book-related links she finds interesting and information on the books she’s selling. “I probably talk about Terry Pratchett, far too much but who can blame me?”
Although she has a limited amount of time for blogging – a couple of hours a day at most – Atmore has plans to develop bookiemonster gradually.
“I enjoy being the voice of a reader and booklover,” she explains. “What I’d like is for BookieMonster to be an online equivalent of an independent bookstore - you drop in, have a chat to the owner, compare books with other readers, read a few interesting articles and leave with a choice purchase or two.”

Footnote:
Nicky Pellegrino, in addition to being a succcesful author of popular fiction, (her latest The Italian Wedding was published in May 2009 while her next, Recipe for Life is due from Orionnext monthl), is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above piece was published on 28 February.