I sometimes come upon a message thread somewhere on in the internet in which my site is mentioned. Invariably, one or more participants are dismayed and sometimes offended that their favorite series is not listed on my site, and they wonder why.
The answer is quite simple: My site represents what I collect and was never intended to be a complete list of all juvenile series books. I created it to supplement what was already out there, and in particular, I wanted to cover some favorite series that sadly had been ignored by others.
It was on July 31 that I encountered the most recent example of a mention of my site.
eBay Bookseller's Board
Of course it was immediately mentioned that I don't have the Betsy-Tacy series listed.
What caught my eye is that someone mentioned my site being on Metafilter, which was an unknown site to me. I then figured out that my site had a staggering number of hits on July 30, due to the mention on Metafilter. In fact, the main page of my site had 1,380 visits from the Metafilter link. Until that day, the main page of my site had never had more than 300 visits in a single day, so this was a very big exposure.
Metafilter discussion about my site
I always enjoy reading these types of discussions, because almost all participants are people from outside our collecting circle. They are people who remember reading the books as children but are not involved in collecting them. Not surprisingly, someone was surprised that Donna Parker is not listed on my site.
Someone else mentioned this hilarious Sweet Valley High blog. I really enjoyed the screen caps with captions from the Sweet Valley High television series. I have never seen any of those shows. I may have to buy the first season on DVD. It should be a riot!
By reading message threads like these, I end up on sites that I have never visited and end up finding some really neat stuff.
3 comments:
Do you think you could make a bit of a list of other series books not listed on your site, just for interest's sake? I'd like to check out some other series.
Something else I've wanted to mention (hope it hasn't already been brought up, sorry if it has) Has anyone else noticed what seems to be a difference in writing style in the Beverly Gray books? I love the later (hard cover) books and am really enjoying BG Reporter at the moment, but I found BG Junior very different in style and hard to get into. Maybe I'm imagining it?
The plots of the early Beverly Gray books are disconnected and wander around between unrelated events. The A. L. Burt Company was more interested in word count than in the quality of the narrative, and Clair Blank was asked to lengthen her stories to reach the desired word count. I assume that she added events that were not necessary to the story. Notice that the page count of the early Beverly Gray books is much higher than the later ones.
Follow the link in this post to the eBay discussion thread. I posted in that thread and gave links to two sites that list hundreds of series. It is because of those sites that I have never been that motivated to come up with a list of series. The work has already been done.
I especially like Mary Crosson's site, since she gives a little bit of information about the different series.
I really need to do something on the main page of my site. I can't tell you how many times I have read complaints where people are upset that a certain series is not listed. Perhaps I should link to those two sites on the main page of my site or place a few links to my links page.
You know what? I noticed that since July 30th my Bonanzle booth views has went up a great deal, and I thought that it was just because of the booksale. Possibly, it is because of your site's new exposure? Wha hoo! :)
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