Spy/Spec Ops Group Blog?

[Michael]

Anyone here interested in contributing to a blog?

I was thinking we use it to post articles about spy/spec ops novels, reviews, news...ect.

It would be open to other things outside of books, maybe movies, news about real life spy/spec ops...ect.

Maybe we could have a yearly group "Book of the year" or something like that. The blog would be heavily tied to our Good Reads group here. Blog posts would be linked here for discussion. Voting on books would be here.

I was thinking if we could get a handful of people to contribute we could run a decent blog that would interest our group and those that like the sort of fiction we do. Also if we had 4-5 people it wouldn't require a ton of time for anyone. Maybe if we could each post 2 times per month each and post news links from time to time we would enough content to make it interesting.

[Matt]

I'm in...I blog some anyway, but without purpose I blow it off. I wrote for newspaper in college and was an editor. Also a Journalism degree. But sort of out of practice. Have an AP stylebook though, just need to get it out.

I'd love to contribute at least on a weekly basis. Keep me in the loop!

[Feliks, Moderator]

Unfortunately I myself am far too busy to commit to any new projects like this.

But here are my (hopefully helpful) thoughts on it, nevertheless: first, I'm wondering whether this GR Group we're in here is naturally the best-positioned flagship for the genre. I think yes, that is the case.

Goodreads is the most popular blog on the net, so oughtn't we just maximize our efforts here? Rather than 'spread ourselves thin'..creating just another obscure blog in the blogiverse. Blogs need lots of marketing to get noticed these days. But here on Goodreads, marketing is 'built-in'.

Although we have 660 members, activity in this group is about a dozen 'regulars'. I can name three other similarly-themed GR Groups which only boast head-counts of around 50 people; they also have a handful of people who post regularly. Its been that way for a couple years at least. So I kinda reckon that what we see here is the approximate 'ceiling' for interest, unless we come up with new marketing strategies.

An option to try: recruit more Goodreads members. Or, members from other book sites. We could create mirror-groups over on Library Thing, Leafmarks, and the other book sites (I have a list of them).

There's other strategies to deploy..in fact I will make a new thread discussing one which dovetails with my remarks above. I know a GR group where we might snag some new members from...but I need assistance to make it work...