BLOGGERS: ONE FOR THE BOOKS Exploring the relationship between book bloggers’ personal motivations and recommendation techniques

Book bloggers play an important role in the circulation of books in the book industry. They review and recommend books, organize reading events and giveaways, and often help authors publicize their books by obtaining advance reading copies (ARCs). They use personal blogs and platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to reach their audiences through electronic word of mouth (eWoM), assisting in attracting consumers’ attention not only through blogging, but by microblogging. However, there are significant research gaps in this area, proving a lack of studies on book bloggers, the process of creating reviews, as well as diversity and representation in the book blogging community and book industry. While research exists on bloggers in general and reviews from various media (e.g. film and TV), there is limited research on the producers’ processes; i.e. the reviewers themselves – in this case, book bloggers. This study provided a start for this area of research by exploring the relationship between book bloggers’ personal motivations and their recommendation techniques on Twitter, i.e. their process of creating posts. This research question was embedded in the context of diversity and representation, and thus book bloggers personality traits and ethnic backgrounds were examined to obtain a richer outlook. Relevant literature was reviewed to build a framework for the study, which employed a uses and gratifications perspective. A new scale was created to measure recommendation techniques, and the study was carried out by means of an online survey (N = 330). The statistical analysis of the data gathered from the respondents lead to a number of interesting results. Major findings showed that there is indeed a relationship between book bloggers’ personality traits and personal motivations, as well as between their personal motivations and recommendation techniques. Personality traits lead bloggers’ to have certain motivations for book blogging, and these motivations lead them to use certain recommendation techniques for posting. Examination of the book bloggers’ ethnic backgrounds provided further insight into how their motivations are influenced in an industry in which inequality and biases are present like any other. This has certain implications for the book industry that should be kept in consideration, particularly in today’s age, as discussed further in this paper. Finally, the conclusion offers potential areas for further research.