Over at TDB, we hold the belief that the review site is a resource not necessarily an interactive community. It’s nice to have those communities, blogs and sites where you can gather, chit chat and comment back and forth. However, over there we wanted more so a repository of reviews for people to reference and use in their book buying instead of a site that requires a lot of time, effort, and comments. Nothing bad with either one and there is room for both.

Part of the reason for this is that is how I set up my initial LJ site. I never counted on getting readers nor did I really target a lot of readership and promotion. I definitely saw an increase in comments on opinion topics and occasionally someone would pop over to comment on reviews – usually a fellow reviewer if I’d been diligent about commenting on their site in a kind of quid pro quo. That’s fine and actually allowed me to post or not post depending on my own time and interest. I continued to post reviews almost every day.

That same philosophy carries over to the WP site and I do enjoy comments. It’s nice that someone cares enough to say something but a trend I find among a lot of blogs are that reviews don’t get a lot of comments. There are the huge meta sites that are more communities and offer so many posts that people tend to comment on absolutely everything. These are very interactive sites with tons of visitors, massive book giveaways and so on.

For those of us along the blog reviewing trend, several may get comments on the daily fun posts or the opinion pieces but even their reviews get few comments. Some reviewers have said on twitter that if they don’t get comments, they feel like they’ve failed. I would have given up by now if I felt that way (no snickering from the peanut gallery).

I have to applaud those that carefully tailor their content to be the easiest, the most attractive and the most thought provoking to garner attention and furthermore comments. That’s a special kind of effort and dedication. For my little corner of the world, I’m happy if people stop by, if you want to comment, go at it. If you’re too busy I get that. I can barely keep up with my google reader list (often has 400+ unread posts) so I understand and appreciate people are too busy.

Thank you to anyone who’s taken the time to comment and if you haven’t, well you don’t get cookies but thank you for viewing anyway.
Oh and if you’re some of those who were searching for “Justin Timberlake accident” – you’re SO in the wrong place.

Secondary characters are a gamble. Some are inspired, some are terrible, and some are only good in theory. One of my favorites though is a well crafted best friend. Now there are too many examples to count of great best friends in current literature. Fictional BFFs are pretty much standard in most romances so let me whittle this down a bit.

The best friend theme I love the absolute most is the witty and usually slutty humorous best friend. If he or she is a boozy, pill popping absolute mess for comic relief, all the better. I especially love when the bf is not a know-it-all but instead flawed and confused. I love it when the best friends don’t always the answer. This of course makes the moments when they do offer some rare insight, all the more meaningful and genius-like.

I like my essential secondary characters to be flawed, just as much as the main characters if not more so. In fact there is more room to play with a best friend, make them more extreme since they’re not the ones you have to sell to the reader. I like when they don’t preach and try to “steer” the characters in the right direction. I don’t see why we can’t have a bf just as equally clueless in romance and suggest the worst possible advice.

A nice responsible voice of reason is a good plot device and usually a necessity. I do get that, but I can’t help loving the absolute train wrecks all the more. I find them far more entertaining then smarter, more insightful best friend that offers that sage advice about following his heart.

Some examples of truly entertaining (and likely insane) best friends that come to mind are Rob Rosen’s Hot Lava.

What about you? Do you like or hate the best friend theme and which type gets you going?