{"id":106498,"date":"2017-08-31T10:01:55","date_gmt":"2017-08-31T10:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/?p=106498"},"modified":"2017-09-05T14:29:54","modified_gmt":"2017-09-05T14:29:54","slug":"blogger-spotlight-dane-cobain-socialbookshelves-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/blogger-spotlight-dane-cobain-socialbookshelves-com\/","title":{"rendered":"Blogger Spotlight: Dane Cobain, SocialBookshelves.com"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dane Cobain<\/a> is the author behind SocialBookshelves.com<\/a> a Top 10 UK Literature Blog<\/a>. With a catalogue-style review site, Dane also constricts his review word counts to the number of pages the book has. Here we spoke to Dane about his favourite novel, the rise of audiobooks and his preferred way to work with PRs. \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

How would you describe your blog?
\n<\/strong>SocialBookshelves.com is a book blog with a difference. I don\u2019t specialise in particular genres, I just keep a running list of reviews for every book that I read \u2013 over 1,000 so far. My reviews also have a particular quirk \u2013 their word count is the same as the number of pages in the book, so a 350 page book has a 350 word review.<\/p>\n

Why did you start your blog?
\n<\/strong>I\u2019ve always liked writing reviews. I remember in secondary school we were asked to write reviews for every book that we read. For the other kids, it put them off reading because they didn\u2019t want to write the reports. For me, it meant I was writing 3-5 reports per week. The teacher eventually told me I could stop doing them.<\/p>\n

I started blogging because when I left university, I got a full-time job in social media marketing. I thought that starting a blog would give me a great excuse to get some hands-on experience with a blog of my own. Once I started, it was hard to stop!<\/p>\n

What\u2019s your favourite book, and why?
\n<\/strong>Northern Lights by Philip Pullman because it\u2019s a masterpiece. He\u2019s got a new book coming out that\u2019s a companion novel and it\u2019s great to see a new generation of readers picking up his books because of all of the publicity.<\/p>\n

What makes a good book?
\n<\/strong>It\u2019s a combination of a whole heap of things, from pacing and plot to aesthetics and the cover. For a book to get a 5* rating on my blog, it has to leave me feeling like a slightly different person after reading it and it has to be pleasurable (as opposed to a chore) from start to finish.<\/p>\n

Digital books disrupted an age-old industry, what do you think will be the next big disruptor?
\n<\/strong>They have, although I personally don\u2019t read them. That\u2019s because I like to collect my books, so I only ever read paperbacks and then I keep them in my rapidly expanding library. I keep needing to move to slightly bigger houses to accommodate them all.<\/p>\n

As for the next big disruptor, that\u2019s hard to say. I think audio books will continue to pick up steam and it\u2019ll be more commonplace for people to listen to them, and I think the standard of them will continue to pick up. Over the next ten years or so, there will also be a lot of indie writers breaking through to the mainstream thanks to word of mouth \u2013 the market will decide whether their work is good or not , not a literary agent or a junior editor at a publishing house. On top of that, I think we\u2019ll see more and more books coming out from YouTubers, Instagrammers and other social media celebrities who see it as a way to monetise their audience.<\/p>\n

How many books do you own (roughly)?
\n<\/strong>Well I\u2019ve reviewed every book I own and I have 1,129 reviews, so somewhere around that. The true number is probably closer to 1,250 counting the books I haven\u2019t read yet \u2013 1,300 if you count the copies I have of the books I\u2019ve released myself.<\/p>\n

What makes your blog successful?
\n<\/strong>I think consistency and longevity have played a big part. I update it regularly and work with plenty of authors and PRs to add other content such as interviews, and I also run competitions and use social networking sites. I think a big part of it has been the fact that I\u2019m an author myself and so it\u2019s pretty linked to my daily life. It\u2019s just part of who I am.<\/p>\n

How do you like to work with PRs?
\n<\/strong>I like them to email me with a little bit of information about the books and then I get back to them if I\u2019m interested. I don\u2019t get time to respond to every enquiry unfortunately because there are so many of them.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the one thing PRs should know about you?
\n<\/strong>I only accept physical copies.<\/p>\n

What other blogs do you like to read?
\n<\/strong>I\u2019m going to be honest here \u2013 I don\u2019t actually get much chance to read blogs because I\u2019m so busy with other stuff. I do, however, watch a bunch of different \u2018BookTubers\u2019 \u2013 i.e. YouTubers who talk about books. They mostly talk about YA and middle grade, but I find their passion for books inspiring. Some of my favourites are Jean from Bookish Thoughts<\/a>, Katytastic<\/a> and Brock from Let\u2019s Read<\/a>. It\u2019s great to see how creative people are.<\/p>\n

That said, I do follow friends\u2019 blogs as they post \u2013 but they\u2019re mostly authors rather than other book bloggers.<\/p>\n

Dane Cobain features on the\u00a0Vuelio Media Database<\/a>\u00a0along with thousands of other bloggers, influencers and journalists.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dane Cobain is the author behind SocialBookshelves.com. He spoke to us about his favourite novel, the rise of audiobooks and his preferred way to work with PRs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":400,"featured_media":106499,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7272,4038,6980],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106498"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/400"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106498"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106908,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106498\/revisions\/106908"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}