2013 Armchair BEA Wrapup Post

On this the final day, we encourage you to wrap-up the week with your favorites and highlights of the week. Did you learn something new? Did you connect with a new-to-you blogger? What was your favorite discussion topic? Do you have ideas for future years? 

For me, participating in Armchair BEA is a way to connect to other Bloggers who may not be as lucky as others to attend BEA live and in person. It's a way to read posts, discussions, and participate in Twitter chats to converse with others.

 This years Armchair BEA was extremely successful for me in visits and page views, and I want to thank everyone who stopped by Gizmos Reviews to check out my posts. I want to thank those who have become followers on my blog as well as on Twitter. Let's hope we can keep the discussions going throughout the year!

Without a doubt my favorite part of Armchair BEA was the introduction posts. I loved getting to know others in the blogging community. My second favorite would be Blogger Development. A person can learn a whole bunch of awesome information by reading these posts as well as sharing your thoughts. You can see what others have done before you  that may have worked and what didn't. Blogging is an amazing community if we all choose to participate and communicate with each other civilly and honestly.

Although I didn't participate in the Keeping It Real discussion, there are definite areas of improvement that I am looking forward to as I reach 2 years of blogging the week of June 21! I am honestly impressed with myself for hanging on when I thought about giving up more than a few times.

Blogging is supposed to be for fun, but sometimes it becomes harsher than an actual job. Authors and bloggers should respect each other, and stop the bad behaviors that have been prevalent over the past year. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to walk away from blogging because of the mutual disrespect each side has posted against the other and the unfortunate comments that have been passed back and forth.

I think the one discussion that we will be having for months to come is the FTC's guidelines for making a concise statement about how we come about our ARC's and do our giveaways. Thankfully, there were some BEA folks who took copious notes and we should be seeing their posts in the near future once they get home and unwind from a week of awesomeness.

As for suggestions for next year? I would say keep doing an excellent job; keep getting bloggers interested in attending; continue the awesome Twitter Parties; maybe touch on genre's like steampunk, and Dystopian since we didn't this year. Then, review the FTC's guidelines and see if they've changed since this panel. 

Thank you to everyone who put this together!