MODERATOR: We would like to welcome today, we have four fabulous bloggers with us. Suey, Penelope, Enna, and Emily. They are here courtesy of Diana who is also a blogger. We’re so excited to have them. They have a few things to say and then we’ll open it up to questions.

SUEY: I’m Suey, the name of my blog is “It’s All About Books” and I’ve been blogging for five years. I named it “All about books” because I thought it was going to be all about books, but it’s morphed into lots of other things too. But mostly about books. And… what else?

MODERATOR: Why did you start blogging?

SUEY: I started because I was part of an online book group on Yahoo and they all started talking about their blogs and so I thought it would be really fun. They all started doing book challenges and keeping track of them on their blogs, and so I decided I had better have one too. I had one that was a personal one on Yahoo, but people weren’t looking at that one. So I started what I call my “real” blog.

PENELOPE: I’m Penelope, my blog is “The Reading Fever.com.” I called it The Reading Fever because when I read a good book it’s kind of like an illness that I catch. I can’t get enough. I started blogging because I needed something. I have a son who was going through cancer treatments last year and I needed something to get my mind off of it, so reading and blogging was it. It was the perfect thing.

ENNA: I’m Enna Isilee, my blog is “Squeaky Books.” The name came from that quote that’s below the title. That comes at the very end of The Goose Girl audiobook, if you’re familiar with the books of Bayern; if you’re not, you should be! I just says “I couldn’t remember the last time I stayed up into the squeaky hours of the night” and I thought, “that’s an odd adjective to describe something,”  And I was like “I like books, I like that quote—Squeaky Books.” And that’s how it worked.

 I started blogging for the worst reason: I wanted to get free books. That is a terrible reason because it doesn’t happen like you want it to, ever. So it was really discouraging for the first few years. And that’s not to say that I now get free books, I just got over it. Enna is technically not my name, legally. But it’s what I use for everything blogging and bookish because when I started blogging I was a minor and I had been explicitly told by my parents “You cannot have a blog.” And so I said “I’m going to do it anyway and prove to them I can do it safely.” So I did it under a false name, I never showed my face or voice and as I grew up that kind of became my shtick.

EMILY: I’m Emily, my book-blog is “Emily’s Reading Room.com.” I started blogging about books because I couldn’t keep track of the books I’d read. It’s like water through sand for me. I have a hard time remembering character names, I have a hard time remembering plots. I’ll remember general feelings of how I felt about a book, and I’ll remember that I read it, but the specifics were getting lost. People were asking me for book recommendations and I’d say “Oh, you know, I read some really good books, but I don’t remember what they are.” So it started as a catalogue of what I’d read and then pretty quickly—I started in June 2009 and I thought I was the only person on the planet with this idea, to blog about books; and then I realized there was this whole other group of people that were doing it and so I started networking with other people and it just really caught fire. People were going to book conferences, meeting authors, all sorts of cool stuff. And so I’ve done that. I also freelance write for a local newspaper. Every once and a while an article for a YA book will pop up with my name on it. But [blogging] has kind of become my part time job.