BookBlogWriMo | History of Crazy for YA

Welcome to Day 1 of the #BookBlogWriMo 2014 Challenge hosted by Book Bumblings!

If you are hopelessly confused right now, you should check out our introduction post, where we explain everything about the challenge.

And for those of you who were too lazy to click the link, here is a summary:

BookBlogWriMo is a form of NaNoWriMo for book bloggers. We will be posting everyday about something is the book blogosphere. The posts will be about everything from our bookish pet peeves to our favorite book covers.

Today's topic is......

The History of Crazy for YA

Let's start at our humble beginning....

One day, Cassia, Max, and Tessa were talking about books (like every other day), but this day was different. The conversation eventually turned to the topic of book blogs and reviews. We, being very naive, thought that making a book blog would be a great, and easy way to talk to others about books (and maybe get some free books out of it).

Since the only genre that all of us read is young adult, we decided that was going to be the theme of our blog. I am the clever one who came up with our name. If you have not noticed, it is a pun (we love puns). We are crazy for young adult books, but we are also crazy for "you," our readers. Funny, right?

We also made a very important decision for our blog. We are all going to use the names of our favorite characters. Tessa Gray from The Infernal Devices by Cassandra Clare, Max Ride from The Maximum Ride series by James Patterson, and Cassia Reyes from The Matched series by Ally Condie. We did not (and still do not) think that revealing our personal information is a good idea. Honestly, it does not affect our blogging. 

I will not bore you with the incredibly long and dull story of how we set up the blog and why we chose Blogger, etc. Basically, we had no idea what we were doing and randomly began. 

Our first post was our introduction. 

Our first review was City of Glass by Cassandra Clare (which does not make sense, considering our review of City of Bones was not posted until two weeks later....) 

In our first year, we did not really know what a huge commitment blogging would be. We only had a couple posts in our first months. Honestly, we had no idea about SEO, or memes, or anything really. It's the thought that counts, right?

We started messing with our blog layout. We needed a new header, several different backgrounds, and the lovely labels that you see to the left of your screen (I am so proud of those!). It took two weeks to get it to what it is now. 

So, last summer, we participated in our first blog event, The Sweet Summer Read-a-thon. Only three blogs participated, but it showed us how fun blogging could be. 

Over the summer, we really kicked up our blogging pace. We posted about 5 times a week and everything was great. We started to get more followers, but another obstacle needed to be dealt with....social media. 

We decided that we wanted to have more of a presence in the blogging community. So, we started a Facebook page, a Pinterest account, and a Bloglovin profile. 

That brings us to the present. We know a little bit more about book blogging, but we have also learned that being yourself online is just as important as in real life.

Now, we (try to) maintain Facebook, Pinterest, Booklikes, and Goodreads. We still do not have a Twitter, and we never will (I have a passionate hate for hashtags).

Thanks for reading my ramble about our blog beginnings. I hope you look forward to a whole month of us rambling and ranting about our blog adventures. Personally, I cannot wait!