I have to say 2016 is fast becoming my Im’ma-table-flip-everything-and-be-spontaneous year. I mean, seriously guys, I am a walking planner and I never do things not in my calendar. But things are changing these days, and change is always good 🙂

Attending the Philippine Readers & Writers Festival 2016 hosted by National Bookstore is probably the last thing I thought I’d do in August since the November Bar Exams is fast approaching (only 2 months away!) and I knew I had to really focus on reviewing. I felt, though, that I needed (1) some sort of a reward for the past months that I have been toiling and (2) something to inspire me for the hell months ahead. So what better way to do it than be somewhere I haven’t been and do something I haven’t done 🙂

Allie from A Literary Wanderer and I planned to go to the event together. We just recently knew each other from our newly created book club (#NALitLoversPH), and decided to finally meet up in real life and go to the event together! We also got to meet up with JM from Book Freak Revelations and everything was just so fun with JM around! I have met JM  when I attended #BookwormsUnitePH 2016 and he was one of the hosts-slash-organizers. 🙂 I was so glad I got to go around Raffles with these two, and had real good fun during our lunch together! Couldn’t have asked for a better company! 🙂

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The Philippine Readers & Writers Festival is a 3-day event held at Raffles Hotel Makati. It is three days of book signings, discussions, and panels about books, literature, and culture from top Filipino writers and artists. I wanted to attend several discussions and panels but I was only able to go to one: Book Blogging 101: Growing Web and Social Media Presence to Promote Books and Literature

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One of the members of the panel is Hazel from Stay Bookish, whom I recently met during the #BookwormsUnitePH 2016 event 🙂 Hazel is such a darling! I felt how passionate she is with reading, blogging and designing as she shared really helpful tips about starting and maintaining a blog. She stressed how blog design is such an important thing and how it could probably make or break your blog. I mean, of course content is always the number one priority, but how your blog looks can totally make an impact whether readers would still want to go back to your page. And it definitely makes sense because your blog is your home in the inter-web and you wouldn’t want your virtual home messy and all over the place. I really loved how Hazel was so professional but passionate at the same time at what she does 🙂

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Eunice from Nerdy Talks Book Blog was also one of the members of the panel and she’s more of the representative from the Bookstagram community. She blogs also, but she focused more on the topic of maintaining a bookstagram account and she gave lots and lots of tips about how to make your photos more interesting and not look boring and repetitive. This girl is one heck of a superwoman! She shoots (and pre-shoots!) photos at very specific hours of the day just to catch natural lighting; and she chooses from about 20 or so photos for just one Instagram post. So I guess that’s around 150 photos to choose from in a week? Insane! I wish I have her patience! You go, girl! 🙂

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I’ve been following Kate from The Bookaholic Blurbs in Twitter for sometime now and I’m so glad to have finally met her in person! She’s so bubbly and funny and super true to herself. What she is in Twitter and in her blog is definitely how she also is in person. One thing I learned from Kate is you have to actually just write everything out no matter what your feels are about a book. Be it a 1-star or a 5-star review, put it out there because they’re your feelings and you’re entitled to every bit of it. She also made me think of getting a .com already to make it more legit. Ha! Not that this isn’t legit but…yeah. Thinking really hard about it! 🙂 Oh, and don’t you just love her shirt here? She’s the coolest!

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It was my first time to see Lyra from Defiantly Deviant and Kai from Amaterasu Reads and I was just in awe of how they were able to maintain their book blogs for years – and I’m not even talking about only a couple of years or so here. I’m talking 4…5 years? These are book blogging legends! Along with Kate above! 🙂 Their passion coupled with their professionalism definitely showed with how they talked about their experiences, struggles and successes. They’re so inspiring that at some point during the panel discussion I thought I wanna be like them too 🙂 Such inspiring bloggers 🙂

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Book Blogging 101 was such a huge success, thanks to the members of the panel who are all so willing to answer even the most basic questions from the attendees. I had so much fun chatting with old and new friends and I wish there’d be more bookish events like one. 🙂

I wanna know if you guys were at the Philippine Readers and Writers Festival 2016 as well? How was your experience? I hope to see you all in future bookish events!