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Beacon Broadside
Posted by Kevin

So I get this email saying that someone has a blog they want me to check out. No big deal, happens, even to relatively small blog fish like us, every so often. I usually ignore them, mostly out of a lack of time. I figure if it is interesting enough, I’ll stumble across it in the natural course of my reading. This was different for two reasons. One, the emailer actually offered me advice on getting rid of the track back spam. Second, and more importantly, she was upfront about the blog being a publisher publicity blog. But she also said that they tried to be different. I’m a huge book geek, so the combination of good will form the good advice and curiosity got the better of me. And I am glad it did.

The Beacon Broadside is a publisher’s blog, no doubt about that. But they aren’t just a publicity blog, not in the usual sense. The posts are mostly by their authors, and they are usually pretty interesting. There is one by Carol Joffe (who, by the way, wrote a fantastic book. It literally changed the way I looked at abortion politics and Roe v. Wade) about abstinence only sex education. There is a very interesting piece about Chanukah in Israel and the meaning of the holiday by a foreign rights agent. There is a good overview of the differences in the national culture and the meaning of the Romney and Kennedy religion speeches by the author of a book on the Religious Right and its focus on the judiciary. What there isn’t is a lot of hard sell, buy me now, here’s a contest desperation masquerading as marketing. They have their authors write about subjects that interest them and let their writing do the marketing. It’s a very good idea and should be a template for how publishers do blogs.

So it goes on the blog roll, both becasue the concept is interesting and, so far, I’ve liked the posts I have read.

December 13th, 2007 Bloggin, Writing | 2 comments