resolutions 2015

It’s a brand new year, so it’s time for some brand new goals for this year. Last year, I kept things relatively simple, and focused mostly on organizing stuff. Since I finished most of those goals, the simple approach must work! This year, I’m keeping it simple too, but instead of struggling through the TBR pile (which has been significantly reduced by not accepting so many ARCs, limiting my Netgalley picks, and reviewing most of the books I had on my reading list on Netgalley), but instead on community and forming friendships.

Here are my goals:

Participate in more memes. I started out great last year, but lost track halfway through the year. I want to participate in It’s Monday, what are you reading?, Teaser Tuesday, Waiting on Wednesday, and maybe more memes if I find some that interest me.
Finish the reading challenges I signed up for. This worked for me last year by keeping the number of challenges limited, so I’m using the same approach this year, and only participating in five challenges. Hopefully I’ll be able to reach my goals again.
Less reviews, more other posts. I put a lot of time and effort in writing reviews, and basically reviews are the core part of book blogging, but last year I wrote over 300 reviews. I’m exhausted. I stopped reviewing for a while (only reviewing books I had to for tours) and when I wrote my first review in about a week yesterday, the review was so much better than the ones I’d written before during my review slump. So I’ll cut back on the reviews, and instead host guest posts, promos and interviews, because I hardly post those.
Come up with a meme of my own. I’m thinking something along the line of cover wars. I just want to come up with something original for my blog.
Expand my mailing list. I’m not even sure if the mailing list still works. I find them so complicated! If anyone knows an easy-to-use mailing list ,preferably that automatically sends out one post a day or per week (like a recap post, or a post of my choosing), please let me know.
Keep more in touch with the book blogging community. The toughest thing about this is keeping track of blogs without having my email box spammed. I used to have a feedreader, but I haven’t opened that things in years and it looks like it could explode any second. I’ll have to come up with a strategy here. I want to take thing slowly – like follow 10 blogs for a week and comment on their new posts, then add 10 more the next week, and so on.
Add covers of the books I received for review on my Facebook page. Also, keep track of the books I reviewed on Facebook.
Put the latest reviews in the sidebar of my blog. I’ll add the covers and then have them link to the review.
Set up more original posts. This could be discussion posts, tutorials, tricks, anything. I haven’t written any of those in forever, and they’re so much fun.
Update the review index. I think I last updated it around August or something, so not all my reviews are up there.
Revamp the website. I still like the design, but I might change a few small things here and there. Plus, I have to check the links to see if any are broken, the sidebar needs some CSS recoded, as does the newsletter sign up form, and overall, it could use some tweaking. My bio probably needs updating too.