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Defining Canada After One Year (on a Blog)

It’s been a little over a year since we launched this blog and heard what the Quill and Quire initially thought. We’ve had our rough ups and downs with the blog as we tried to determine our own approach to blogging. Finally after a year — staff are beginning to settle in with the idea of blogging. This is probably why you may have found that the style of writing has changed over time as well as the personalities. I’m also pretty sure most people are probably happy to hear from someone other than myself.

We originally formed the blog as a way that we could communicate with the public and our authors while our website was being redeveloped. What we discovered was that the blog was as much of an entity as was the website — they co-exist. Personally, I love to see people comment on our blog — telling us what they think (giving us a piece of their mind).

Maple Leaf Mosaic by Chris Darling

A Look at the Past Year

After a year, we’ve blogged over 400 different posts — not bad for a first year. Let’s take a look at ten posts from Dundurn that changed the way we blog — starting from the earliest.

1. No this wasn’t our first blog post, this was our second one! We announced a chat that took place last year with Maureen Jennings about her first Christine Morris mystery, Does Your Mother Know?

2. We tried to introduce new books that came in hot off the press, but it didn’t work out so well. But we did learn a lot in the process — especially when it came to playing with photography. Take Don Easton’s second Jack Taggart mystery as an example — Above Ground worked brilliantly for the photo shoot — and the book is awesome for those who love gritty mystery novels involving undercover mounties. Stay tuned for a third book in the series.

3. There’s (almost) nothing better than posting up great reviews on a consistent basis of the books you publish. This was one of our first round ups. It just so happened to also be another staffer’s earlier blog postings.

4. It’s always fun to get to listen to audio interviews online. Especially when you don’t have the opportunity to tune in on the radio. Robert Hoshowsky, author of The Last to Die, had the opportunity to chat with Peter Anthony Holder. Peter provided us with the audio file and we posted it up right away! You can still listen to it… thanks again Peter.

5. If you can remember when the first CD-ROM encyclopedia first arrived in the early 90s, then you can remember how amazing it was to be able to view tiny movie clips direct from your computer. Fast forward to 2007 and we’ve got YouTube. Lance Goddard, author of Hell and High Water, provided us with some amazing video interviews with the Canadian veterans who fought in the Italian Campaign of World War II — YouTube let us share the first of many videos here.

6. After the Quill and Quire posted an article about the future of bookchat, I decided to run our own internal poll. This was vital blog post as it quantified and provided a visual manner of interpreting how people really felt about different mediums and their impact on our individual daily lives. To this day, it still fascinates me how people regard newspapers and blogs. Perhaps we’ll do a follow up study — another time.

7. The first author to start blogging on Defining Canada. J.D. Carpenter, author of mystery novel 74 Miles Away, and forthcoming Twelve Trees — went on a one month tour around the United States to do research on a book he is working on. While J.D. was initially a little hesistant, he turned out to be a brilliant blogger. He blogged daily about his adventures and provides some interesting side stories. This one was a favourite of mine. Make sure you check out his American Odyssey (you may need to work your way backwards).

8. Believe it or not, the Amazon Kindle ebook reader continues to be of interest to many many Canadians. They just keep searching for it and they arrive here. Sorry folks, but the Kindle just hasn’t arrived yet in Canada.

9. Just for fun around the time of the holidays. We polled ourselves and the public about whether or not they enjoyed fruitcake. By no means is this an accurate poll but — the no side wins — for now…

10. This may seem like a normal post and it is. It was a great review of Caroline Rennie Pattison’s The Law of Three. However it was also the beginning of you hearing less from me and more from others here at Dundurn.

Mind you there are so many notable posts that I can’t list them all (it is over 400 after all), so I encourage you to explore.

Just to give you a brief idea of how we’ve been doing — this is a graph of the number of posts we make per month from beginning to the present.

Now what? The future!

Look out for some upcoming changes to our blog. Some big and some small. We hope to serve up a nice new and fresh platter of variety to suit your taste buds. More voices and more interesting tales to tell.

Thanks for visiting us over and over again for the first year — let us know if there’s something you want to see more of!

© 2008 Defining Canada.