Carnival!
Does anyone know if there's a well-established carnival for crime fiction blogs? I don't know of any.
If you're wondering what I've been smoking, a carnival is a way of gathering interesting blog posts around a theme on a regular basis. Sometimes the carnival has a regular pitch (a stable blog URL), but more often the carnival moves from one blog to another, with editorship shifting from week to week. They are generally numbered and each carnival tells where the next one will be held and where to send your contributions (which are usually posts on your own blog, written up by that week's editor into a nifty round-up blog post). It may simply call attention to interesting posts on a regular basis, or it may be thematic: carnival 23: new crime fiction from Europe; carnival 24: urban crime; carnival 25: wicked women, carnival 26: what's so golden about the Golden Age? That sort of thing.
Anyway... what makes a carnival different than what's already out there? Let me count the ways:
The content is all new - not links to news stories or reviews. It becomes a sort of Utne Reader for blog content.
The content is bloggish - informal, relatively short, personalized, not a replacement for the fine crime fiction magazines that publish more substantial feature articles.
It's not about promotion, as virtual author tours are. (Personally, I'd be interested in one focused on the genre and those who love it rather than on authors and the writing business.)
It's not the guest posts that many blogs already organize. More blogs and bloggers would be involved in a wider network - like one of those progressive parties that visits many homes and probably empties a few bottles along the way.
So: two questions -
Does this already exist? (And if so, why didn't you tell me!?)
If the answer is "no," is anyone interested in starting one? I'm willing to organize it and serve as Chief Archivist if there's interest.
If you're wondering what I've been smoking, a carnival is a way of gathering interesting blog posts around a theme on a regular basis. Sometimes the carnival has a regular pitch (a stable blog URL), but more often the carnival moves from one blog to another, with editorship shifting from week to week. They are generally numbered and each carnival tells where the next one will be held and where to send your contributions (which are usually posts on your own blog, written up by that week's editor into a nifty round-up blog post). It may simply call attention to interesting posts on a regular basis, or it may be thematic: carnival 23: new crime fiction from Europe; carnival 24: urban crime; carnival 25: wicked women, carnival 26: what's so golden about the Golden Age? That sort of thing.
Anyway... what makes a carnival different than what's already out there? Let me count the ways:
The content is all new - not links to news stories or reviews. It becomes a sort of Utne Reader for blog content.
The content is bloggish - informal, relatively short, personalized, not a replacement for the fine crime fiction magazines that publish more substantial feature articles.
It's not about promotion, as virtual author tours are. (Personally, I'd be interested in one focused on the genre and those who love it rather than on authors and the writing business.)
It's not the guest posts that many blogs already organize. More blogs and bloggers would be involved in a wider network - like one of those progressive parties that visits many homes and probably empties a few bottles along the way.
So: two questions -
Does this already exist? (And if so, why didn't you tell me!?)
If the answer is "no," is anyone interested in starting one? I'm willing to organize it and serve as Chief Archivist if there's interest.
Views: 127
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by chelbel on
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It sounds interesting to me. I don't think i could become involved at the moment as i have a savage workload but i'd follow it!
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Permalink Reply by Barbara Fister on
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True - but crimespot is more of a blog aggregator. The idea of a carnival is not just to pull together links but to write about what's going on out there, comment on it and then pass it along to the next host. That way readers get to visit various blogs and each carnival host gets to put their own spin on the crime fiction scene. It might be a bit more like a a blogging party where we seek our inner Sarah Weinmans. On an ongoing basis.
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Permalink Reply by Karen from AustCrime on
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Barbara - I'm not aware of one at all and it would be interesting.
Setting up what you're talking about could be an interesting task - yell if you need a hand from the back-end point of view - we might be able to collaborate if you need a place to "be".
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Permalink Reply by Christa M. Miller on
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Sounds a bit like what MotherTalk.com does with blog book tours and "bonanzas" - the latter especially. The one we did to promote Ariana Huffington's latest book had a "fearless" theme in which we blogged about fearless parenting. The blog book tours are basically reviews, but the tour organizer aggregates the bloggers on that one site. You can visit the site to get more of an idea of what I'm talking about to see if it matches your idea.
In general I love the idea!
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Thanks - I was looking for an example but the one I'm professionally aware of would not sound like much fun (really, who but nerdy librarians would be excited about the Carnival of the Infosciences?) Wikipedia defines what they are and some of their citations provide more details.
Karen - I'll be in touch! I think it's worth a try.
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Permalink Reply by Donna Moore on
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I'm not sure I QUITE understand it, and I don't have a blog apart from here on Crimespace but I'd be interested since it sounds like fun (of course, since I don't totally understand it, I might be completely wrong!) and I like your idea of the themes. I'm not a big fan of those blog book tour things because it just feels like OTT BSP and just tends to put me off the book in question, but this idea sounds interesting and entertaining.
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