Secret Life of a Book Blogger

Posted by: Redhead on: September 3, 2019

• In: Uncategorized
• 28 Comments

As you can see from my recent posts, my brain hasn’t been in a review-writing mood lately.  This short list of “secret life” questions has been doing the rounds –  I’ve seen it at Don Jimmy Reviews,  Tattooed Book Geek, Always Trust in Books, on twitter, etc.  It looked like fun, and I like fun and shyly talking about myself, right?

be warned – these answers are boring and practical.   I tell it how it is.

 

How Long have you been blogging?

Little Red Reviewer has been going since 2010,  so nine years here.  total blogging online and posting book reviews on various sites? probably closer to 13 years.

 

At what point do you think you will stop blogging?

to be honest, I think I am getting close to that point.   When I started this blog, I was working part-time, my commute to work was 5 minutes, I didn’t have a lot of hobbies, and I just didn’t have a lot of stuff going on in my life.  I needed a hobby, and something to pour my creative energy into, you know?  Nine years later, I have a very fulfilling full time job with an hour commute each way,  not that much time to read, and other less time-consuming projects to pour my creative energy into.  Blogging was the perfect creative outlet for me at the time.  I think i’m getting to the point in my life where it is one of many creative outlets.

 

What is the best thing about blogging?

the community!  thanks to blogging, I have friends EVERYWHERE!  I’ve done read alongs,  buddy reads, themed months,  organized  blog tours.   Those things were possible because of our amazing and supportive community!

What is the worst thing? What do you do to make it OK?

the pressure to put out content on a regular basis.

the FOMO when every else gets an ARC that you didn’t get.

the guilt that you didn’t read for 20 hours this weekend.  the guilt that you are reading a book that YOU want to read, instead of the book that is hyped or the book that you got talked into doing for a blog tour.

the pressure to simply kick out content as fast as you can and have more hits and more comments and more social media followers than someone else.

What do I do to make it ok? As a way to lower my anxiety, I have mostly disengaged from the blogging community, which is a shitty thing to do, I guess, but whatever.    That seems to be my defense mechanism for everything lately – disengage.  People should do whatever makes them happy, and I don’t want to be a  buzzkill, so I just wander off and do whatever makes me happy. I’m a exhausted introvert – a lot of time the thing that makes me happy is sitting in a quiet room, enjoying the quiet.

 

how long does it take to make/find pictures to use?

my pictures are mostly book cover art,  so it’s a few minutes of google image search, or snapping a quick photo of the book with my phone.

 

Who is your book crush?

list of characters i have had crushes on is about 100 characters long.

list of authors I have (or had) crushes on is about 5 authors long.

 

What author would you like to have on your blog?

When I got the chance to interview Jeff Vandermeer,  I was like “this is the best life can get, i better retire now!”.  that was a little while ago.

What do you wear when you write your blog posts?

 

i’m barefoot, that’s for darn sure.

how long does it take you to prepare?

 

hours? days? weeks?  99% of how I  blog is thinking about what i’ve read, rolling it around in my brain, thinking about how it makes me feel, how it might (or might not) connect to other things. I need quiet space to think,  so I write a lot of posts in my head either on the drive to or from work, while i’m in the shower, or while i’m sitting in a quiet room enjoying the quiet.  Sometimes i can kick out a post in an hour, sometimes it takes a week.  Which is why the pressure to kick out content as fast as you can is soul-destroying for me.

 

How do you feel about the blogging community?

love it!  everyone is friendly, supportive, cheerful!  it’s like the best meet-up ever!  the internet is full of toxicity and awful comments,  but i feel like the blogging commuting is what we all dreamed the internet could be – passionate people who like to share the stuff they love.  it’s like, we don’t care what kind of books you like – if you enjoy reading, you are one of us!

 

What do you think one should do to create a successful blog?

 

to be cliche,  “success” means different things to different people.   I can only tell you what worked for me.

I treated my blog as a hobby, as something I did for fun.  Posts that I agonized over, books that were very meaningful to me, books that changed the way I thought about the world –  these blog posts were gifts I gave to myself.

I grew my following by being patient and by making the first move. I looked for other bloggers who had similar tastes as me, and I comments on their blog posts (even posts from a year ago!), I let them know I appreciated what they were doing.  If you leave a nice comment on someone else’s blog, they will, nine times out of ten, visit your blog to see what you’re all about.   I realized that the size of my following had zero to do with my success as a blogger.

I was kind to myself when things didn’t work out as I’d hoped. When a post that took me a week to write got one like and zero comments, and post that took 10 minutes to write got 30 comments and 50 likes, I was kind to myself.  I realized that stats have nothing to do with if I feel like i’m succeeding as a blogger.

When my life is super busy and I don’t have time to read or blog, I’m kind to myself.

i don’t view blogging as an obligation, or a job, or a way to make money, or a way to ingratiate myself to publicists or authors or other bloggers.  I view blogging as a gift I give myself, I view the blogosphere as a welcoming community.

that’s what worked for me.  I guarantee your mileage will vary.

 

did you like these questions?  steal ’em and put them on your blog!

Tags: book blogging, Secret Life of a Book Blogger