Blogger Babble: My Blog is 3 months Old and What I've Learned
I know I've only been at this for a very short time, but boy, has it been a learning curve. So I thought I would share some of the things that I have learned about #bookblogging since I've been in the game.
First and foremost - The Book Blogging community is awesome. I mean, seriously: You are connecting with like minded people and even though you may not all read the same books/genres or like the same authors/characters etc. we all have a love of the written word.
And not only this, the book blogging community is WELCOMING. They WANT to interact with you and have you in the blogosphere.
There's weekly memes to participate in that can help you get out there to meet people and even outside of these more often than not bloggers will come and comment back on your blog when you go out and comment on theirs. This community is full of support.
It's true - I don't get as much 'book' reading time. I read a lot about books and I read a lot of other bloggers posts, but my pages count has gone down.
It's OK though! I'm still entertained and I am interacting with people that love books as much as I do and I'm getting to chat about books I wouldn't necessarily have looked at previously.
Confession: I probably spend more time blogging about books than actually reading them!
More than anything else - Book Blogging is HARD WORK. Not only do us book bloggers need to READ ALL THE BOOKS we are also expected to provide interesting (and hopefully intelligent) content for our blogs.
Then we need to be checking out the other book bloggers and commenting on their interesting content.
All of this takes time. A lot of time and effort. How much time? I don't even want to count the hours I put into my blogging to be honest. Suffice to say, it's A LOT.
Blog upkeep, social media upkeep, acquisition of new books to read - none of this is easy folks! There's the Facebook page, Twitter profile, Goodreads profile, Instagram and many other possible realms that I haven't yet ventured into.
Then there's the simple matter of Blog design. You can fight with your blogging platform EVERY SINGLE DAY about formatting, design and functionality. HTML? CSS? Graphics design? Become and blogger and you will learn it all.
You DO get to talk about books obviously - but that also comes with a lot of pressure when you're an actual book blogger. There's a certain responsibility that means that you can't just leave "I liked it" as your feedback. You need to actually come up with something comprehensive to write about the book and if you're adding gifs to your review? Well then you have to find the perfect one and that on it's own is a time consuming and mammoth task.
So there's a lot more to this gig than I might have thought when I started, but I wouldn't take it back. Not only do I have a whole lot of space to obsess over my favourite past time, but I have met so many people that will obsess with me! And while it might be a lot of work and at times overwhelming, it's more fun than anything else.
Thanks for reading! Is there anything else you think I should know about book blogging by now? Anything that will shock me in the near future?
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