time spent on your Labor of Love
Posted May 16, 2013
on:The other day I posed a random question on twitter, aimed towards book bloggers. it was:
how much time does “content creation” for your blog take? how many hours per week?
Responses ranged from “4-5 hours per week”, to “up to 8 hours per week”, to “it varies”. But if you are a book reviewer, you’ve got to read the darn book before you can review it, right? so maybe 8-10 hours to read the book, and then 2-3 hours working on a review?
It takes me at least a few days to read the book, sometimes I’m lucky enough that the review practically writes itself in an hour, other times I agonize over a review for days. So for me, let’s call it 8-20 hours per week. sometimes the book is a fast read, sometimes it takes forever, sometimes I even get two reviews done in a week! twenty hours a week? Labor of love indeed.
So, to everyone else, on twitter and not, all kinds of bloggers – food/recipe bloggers, webcomic bloggers, TV/movie/anime bloggers, photo bloggers, parenting bloggers, people who blog about their lives and adventures, people who blog about anything and everything, it’s your turn, and I do honestly want to know.
how much time do you spend, per week, creating content for your blog?
40 Responses to "time spent on your Labor of Love"
I’m going to quibble over definitions a little. All the books I read for my blog are things I would have read anyway, one way or another. As such, it wouldn’t be right to count that as ‘content creation’ time, I think. At least for me. I think there was one occasion in the past when I kept reading a book I would otherwise have put down because I wanted to blog about it, and while I quite like the finished post the actual experience of reading it was so tedious that I’ve never done it again (though I’ve come close a couple of times). I’m not getting paid or getting anything for free by blogging, so if it starts to feel like ‘work’ then it’s just not worth it.
So a related question, has blogging about books changed the way you read them?
As for the rest, the ‘big’ (usually) non-book posts I put up on Fridays take a bit longer. They’re a bit stream-of-consciousness though, so generally 1-2 hours to write in draft, then the same to edit and polish over the course of the next few days. Not that you’d know it. I hear you on the formatting though. I’m a bit link-happy at the best of times, and so many hours have disappeared looking for a very specific clip on youtube but not being able to work out just the right search terms to find it.
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I have about two hours of me time every evening (if the kids cooperate that is and go right to sleep once put to bed) and I can read about 75 to 100 pages in that time. I mostly write my reviews on the weekends and on my day off work and during my lunch break at work. Writing up a review takes about 90 mins if I’m on a roll without distractions, longer if not. With three posts per week (well that’s the aim anyway) that would make for about five or six hours spent actually writing posts and a lot more reading. But as the others said before me, I’d have been reading anyway!
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Hmm, it varies for me SO much, I’m not even sure how to figure out a number. I suppose I’d say 1-4 hours a week, but that is only if I’m not doing any picture intensive posts. I also would have read the books I end up reviewing anyway, so I don’t think I’d count that as part of the content creation. I have gotten some monetary return over the years from my blog, in the form of presents and donations and amazon gift certificates. Doesn’t pay for all that time, but makes it even sweeter and more fun.
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For me it varies wildly. The reading part comes easy enough, but writing something that I’m happy enough to post takes me ages. Getting a review to a coherent form can take anywhere from 2 hours to a couple of days.
While I’d be reading anyway I must admit that I take a different approach to books I want to review. I tend to pay more attention, make more notes and in general scrutinize it more than a book I’m reading purely for enjoyment (not that review books aren’t enjoyable too!).
If I had to put a number to it I’d say around 20 hours a week including reading time. Generally reading 500+ page novels also doesn’t help.
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[…] much time do I spend on content creation? Andrea at the Little Red Reviewer had an interesting post about this very topic and here’s my answer — not much as I’m […]
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Lately, it’s not been much time at all since I’ve sort of been ignoring my blog and posting about once a week. I don’t think of the reading as part of the content creation but I guess it is because I have to invest the time in reading which can take anywhere from 6 to 10 hours depending on the size and type of book it is. I can write a review/post in about an hour or so but sometimes I spend too much time on the editing. I don’t know why that is. Now I’m thinking about how to reorganize my time to have the blog work better. Not an easy task for me but we’ll see how it plays out.
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If you leave out the reading time I would say anywhere from 8-10 hours a week. Some weeks much, much more. If I am doing any art-related post or post with multiple images that time increases a great deal because of the image editing, loading, placement, etc. Adding in the reading you are looking at 15-20 hours a week? I certainly think that time counts because while I would, like kamo, probably read the books anyway, but at the same time I do make decisions on what I am reading based on thoughts about what I want to review and when. Also I would consider time I spend on other peoples’ blogs as a part of that labor of love too, not purely as a networking thing but because that informs what I do and how I do it too. The relationships I have with other bloggers, as we all know, takes time commitment to build and maintain and that is every bit as much a labor of love.
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1 | Two Dudes in an Attic
May 16, 2013 at 7:27 pm
Well, these are numbers I arrived at in grad school, when I was working under deadline, but they hold more or less true I think. I read at an average (in English) of 50 pages an hour. I can write one single spaced page in an hour, if I already know what I’m going to say, at least double that if I don’t. Soooo, for an average 350 page SF novel, that’s seven hours of reading (90% of that is on my 2 hr.+ commute, so no net cost to me), probably 1.5 hours of straight writing and editing (my posts are generally one page plus a paragraph or two), and about that much mulling over what to say. 10 hours total? It’s the post organization that gets me; I only have 1-3 hours of Me Time every night, so that averages out to one post per week.
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Redhead
May 16, 2013 at 8:00 pm
numbers FTW!
I don’t read as fast as you, but an hour sounds about right for typing up a rough draft, especially if I’ve brainstormed ahead of time about what I want to say. But who knows how much time I spend brainstorming? i tend to do a lot of that when my brain is on autopilot – like in the shower or exercising.
the formatting does kill me sometimes, i can paste the text in, but adding in images, tags, page breaks, some other stuff, it takes time! I’ve learned the hard way to never ever say “I’m almost done, give me 10 minutes!” when formatting.
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Two Dudes in an Attic
May 17, 2013 at 12:14 am
You will note my complete lack of formatting, pictures, embedded videos, or anything more complex than a hyperlink. There is a reason for this. :d
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Redhead
May 17, 2013 at 10:57 am
I think I did the embedded video thing once. NEVER AGAIN.
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