A New Year, A New Way of Reading

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and a great New Year. I can hardly believe that it’s the 4th already and I’m so excited to begin another year of blogging. It’s that time of year where everyone is setting their Goodreads challenges and sharing their reading goals so today I wanted to talk a little bit about how I plan to read in 2017.

For the past seven years I have taken part in some reading challenge or another whether it was vowing to read a certain number of books by the end of the year, or to read more from a specific genre, for the last seven years I have pushed myself to meet targets and deadlines and whilst that was really fun and helpful to my reading a few years ago, I have since fallen out of love with the idea of reading challenges.

Over the last half of 2016 I found myself reading very differently to how I have been. I’d started stressing out about how many books I’d read and would feel pressure from myself to be reading a certain type of book to meet a challenge I set for myself and that suddenly made reading feel like a chore.

I noticed that last year if I wasn’t reading a book quickly enough or was falling behind with my goals I’d start to feel really anxious when I was reading and instead of focusing on the story I’d be paying more attention to the number of pages read and how many chapters of the book I had left. Something I’ve always loved to do began to feel really stressful and nobody was putting that pressure on me except myself.

So in 2017 I have decided to ditch reading challenges all together. Other than trying to stay on top of review books and reading books for blog tours I am going to have a free reading year to read as much or as little as I want. Reading challenges are a great way of keeping track of your reading, pushing yourself to read more and discovering new books but for me recently they’ve done me more harm than good.

Because of this new way I’ll be reading in 2017 I will no longer be doing a monthly round up of all of the books I have read each month and where I am on my reading challenge, but I will be replacing this feature with a more personal monthly favourites post highlighting not only the books I have loved but other personal favourites in my life too be them bookish events or bloggers that I have loved following. I hope you all understand and will enjoy the new changes. I will still be sharing everything I read on Goodreads and Instagram as I read it so you can follow me there if you’d like to.

Life is too short to be feeling anxious and stressed over a hobby and I’m looking forward to trying a new, more laid-back way of reading in 2017.

Introducing My New Commenting System: IntenseDebate what is it?

If you have your own blog run on blogger you’ll probably have noticed the amount of spam bloggers rubbish commenting system has been letting through recently. It’s something that’s been driving me nuts and so I’ve been on the lookout for a new commenting system for some time now. I’ve always liked the look of IntenseDebate but I didn’t realise you could install it on to blogger until recently so I decided to make the switch, mainly because of spam, but also because IntenseDebate is so much more user friendly and is a lot more advanced than what blogger has going on.

Some of you might be wondering what IntenseDebate is exactly? And why is it so much better? Basically it has a much stricter policy on spam and it lets the user have better control of what gets through. It also allows readers to leave a comment under the ‘Guest’ option where you post your name, email, and a link to your own website (if you have one) once and IntenseDebate will remember your information the next time you leave a comment on my blog. There is also the option of signing in with your IntenseDebate profile, Wordpress account, or Twitter. I really like how you can leave a comment through your Twitter account as that’s where most of my audience is based and comes in from. There is also the option of including CommentLuv which basically will link your comment with the most recent post from your own blog, so when you comment it’ll be much easier for me to find your blog and return the favour which is always something I like to do! There is also the option of putting a thumbs-up next to thoughtful comments therefore rewarding those people who take the time to give thoughtful feedback.

Basically Intensedebate is a lot more user friendly for both myself and you guys and I’m hoping it’ll encourage people to leave more comments. I LOVE getting comments from you guys; I really appreciate every one of them and reply to them all. I also try my hardest to stop by your blogs and return the favour. I’ve never been a particularly comment heavy blog which is a shame as I love discussing books with you guys and hearing your opinions too. The views are there but for some reason people just aren’t commenting. I’m hoping this new system might change that.

I’ve heard people who love IntenseDebate and people who haven’t gotten along with it at all so this is by no means permanent. It’s easy to uninstall at any time so I’m going to give it a fair run for a couple of months and then assess whether it has helped my comments or not in terms of how many I receive and how much spam gets let through. It’s easy enough to use so I really hope you guys like it! I’m going to leave it there but please feel free to test out the new system below. I optioned to start using IntenseDebate as of now so all of my old comments on older posts should still be there which is nice. If you’re looking to sign up and install IntenseDebate yourself it’s free and so far I’d really recommend it! I followed this tutorial here. It was fairly simple to install and the step by step guide was really helpful!

Thank You and Announcement!

So this is just a quick little post to say one huge thank you. As some of you may know I made it into the top ten of the blogink competition, now before you all get too excited, I didn’t win. But I’m actually really okay with that. Getting into the top ten was amazing enough on its own and the support I received during the contest was staggering and really touched me so I wanted to take the time to say that, although I didn’t win, your support was amazing and I wanted to say a huge thank you to those of you who watched/supported my video.

To celebrate getting so far in the competition I’ve decided to go ahead and reward myself with something I’ve been looking into and thinking about for some months now. Everyone… I’m getting my own custom blog design!

I really started to look into getting the blog a designer this summer but something was always not quite right. I’d find designers I liked but then I wouldn’t go through with it either because the price was too high, the waiting list too long or they weren’t taking any new orders at the current time and then I got ill and it just didn’t happen. I decided to look back into it as a treat for both me and you guys when I got into the top ten and found my dream designer in Lori at Imagination Designs. Lori’s been fantastic to work with so far and we’ve already come up with some ideas about what I want for the blog. I put down a deposit the other day and I’m currently on the waiting list for April.

The blog is going all fancy pants! I love what we’ve come up with so far and Lori has designed some of my very favourite blogs so I’m really excited for my own personal dream blog design in 2013. I figured this was a good way of giving myself a pat on the back, bettering the blog, and also giving a little something back to you guys with a pretty blog to look at.

Needless to say this is something I’m really excited about and I hope you guys will like the final outcome when it’s ready. Once again thank you so much for supporting me during blogink, and even though I didn’t win I’m looking forward to bringing new and exciting things to this blog in 2013!

Changes and Upcoming Blogoversary!

Hi lovely followers, So if you’re reading this post then I take it that your noticing the changes I’ve made to the blog. I’ve wanted to change the blogs look for a while. I wanted to go for a simpler, cleaner look that wasn’t so girly and would appeal more to boys. I really love my new look and I hope that you guys do too! I have my very first blogoversary coming up next month and so decided to get the blog all fancy pants for that. I’ve made a lot of changes and commenting is now easier than ever so feel free to have a look around and explore. For the blogoversary I’m planning lots of exciting stuff including an international giveaway of a book of your choice from a list of my very favourite books. Also a little post on what I love most about blogging and how my reading and life’s changed since starting up Jess Hearts Books. I also have a lot of exciting stuff coming up for the summer with guest posts, my summer reading list and my summer reads recommendations for you guys! Times have been tough lately with my computer not working properly for months and personal things at home but your constant support and encouragement never fail to amaze me and always make me eager to provide regular quality stuff for you guys to enjoy. Anyway the dog days are over and things in my life seem to be coming together more and more. I can’t wait to see where this next chapter in blogging takes me and am sending huge thank you’s to anybody who’s ever followed, commented, or supported this blog in any way. Hope you enjoy the new changes! Jess