BLOGS AND WEBSITE CONTENT
Through my internship with Foggy Pine Books, I was able to gain a lot of experience creating content for their website, including blog articles and book reviews. Below are a few examples of the writing I was able to do while working with them.
Book Reviews
This book review ended up a bit more well-rounded than the first draft of the "The Golden Compass" book review did, just because I had become more experienced and comfortable writing in that setting. I knew the expectations set for me, and I met them: this review delves a lot more into the the things a reader would like to know about a book before reading it, such as how the plot progresses and what the characters are like.
"The Golden Compass" was the first book review I'd ever written, and I made sure to research thoroughly into the subject before I started. Mary Ruthless, the owner of Foggy Pine Books, was also very helpful: she gave me feedback and pointed out ways I could make the review a bit stronger. With that, I was able to create a second draft that was much more thoughtful, and presented a more in-depth discussion of the book.
Blogs
This blog post was created a few weeks into the lockdown back in April, when all of the bookstore's future events had been put on hold and there wasn't much to write about. So, I came up with a blog post that readers could participate in from home; a discussion about bookshelf organization. I reached out to all of Foggy Pine's employees , asked them to tell me how they organized their shelves at home, and had them send me pictures. The result was an engaging read that compared different methods of organization that readers could try at home.
The "Mythology" blog post was very fun and challenging; it's an overview of 20 different books that readers of the Percy Jackson series might enjoy: books that deal with all sorts of mythology, legends, and fairy tales. While it did take a great deal of focus to write such a long article, I really enjoyed all the research that I put into it. I got to learn about so many fascinating tales and mythologies from different cultures, and then share that information with the readers.
"Up & Coming Books of 2020" was a similar idea to the "Mythology" blog post; it's an overview of 10 books that were due to come out in early 2020. What was unique about this post, however, was that none of our readers could have already read these books; only booksellers had the Advanced Readers' copies. So, while writing this post, I had to find the balance between giving just enough information to be intriguing without spoiling the story.
This blog post was about the new Sandman TV show that is in the works, based off the original comics from Neil Gaiman. This post was my first opportunity to write in the tone of Foggy Pine Books' store. Seeing as I based my writing voice for this piece off of their previous blog posts, I'd say I did fairly well.