Did we miss the memo?
Apparently, BookTube and Book Blogs are at war, and I’m wondering if I’m the only one who didn’t get the memo?
I decided to write this post to share my thoughts on why this perception may exist, and why I think it’s important for members of both communities to not be afraid to speak up and say, “hey, there’s actually no bad blood here”.
My awareness of this “issue” began with watching Thoughts on Tomes video on YouTube. A couple of days later, I actually stumbled upon this post, which was written by the Blogger in question in Sam’s video.
First of all, it is my opinion that Book Blogs and BookTube are two separate communities. Yes, both groups love to read and put reviews out there on the inter-webby-waves, but we are two distinct platforms, which overlap at times, but aren’t really one and the same. When…
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I didn’t get the memo either!
Well if YOU didn’t get the memo, then I don’t feel so bad. 🙂
I missed the memo too and I’m pretty happy about that! To be honest I’m just recently learning that BookTubing is a thing but that’s mostly because I live in my own little world.
We are living in the same world, Katherine!
I’ve vaguely heard there’s some tension between the communities, but frankly I don’t follow BookTube. I hate videos of any sort. If I even click on a news story online and it happens to be a video instead of an article I leave. :p
I get that there’s tension over who publishers “like more,” but I can’t buy into that. It’s possible even just within the blog community to be jealous of bloggers who get “more” or “better” ARCs than you, if you want to go down that path. But I think most of realize that blogging isn’t about getting free books, or even getting something as intangible as the “love” of a publisher or whatever. Most of us are just here to talk about books because we like them. 🙂
I don’t follow BookTube either. I’m aware that it’s a thing, but I have no idea anything about it, or that there was contention over the platforms, which is why I shared this. And I totally agree with you about “more, better” comparisons.
I first became witness to this nonsense during BEA. I stay out of it all, but it’s definitely a vicious thing going on.
I’m just gonna stay in my little hole over here. I just didn’t even realize it was an issue.
Well… I did not miss the memo 😉 I know the blogger who ending up kind of taking the fall for the whole thing (which, if you ask me, isn’t fair because there were multiple people in the conversation, and yet only ONE person was targeted), and the thing is, she got so many awful, hate filled comments, even some messages including death threats, all for saying she didn’t really get the appeal of booktube. And the thing is, it wasn’t like she was posting “hey, I don’t like booktube, everyone!” it was in a conversation with people.
I guess I equated it to me saying to you “I do NOT like baseball” and then having the entire MLB and all its fans send me hate mail and accusing me of starting a blogger vs baseball player war. It’s kind of ludicrous really. I won’t even comment on the “response video” because while I think she was TRYING to say that we don’t need to fight, it came off more as a rebuttal against ALL book bloggers.
As for my personal experience? I don’t have the attention span to watch videos 😉 There are a few bloggers who’ve made videos that I DO watch, but that’s mostly because I already know them and like what they have to say. Personal experience with the booktube community at BEA? 50/50. Some were quite nice, and some were downright rude, but I think that’s probably standard in ANY large group of people.
😉
Such a fail, I ended up trying to write something at the bottom, and the whole thing messed up and there’s a random winky face so please just disregard. It was something about me ending the insanely long comment. Why the wink? No idea.