This month, I celebrate 15 years of blogging! In wedding terms, that’s the crystal anniversary – so it feels like a reason to celebrate! In that time, I’ve published just over 440 posts and more than 200 book reviews.
In 2019, when I was celebrating ten years of blogging, I wrote a post about the things I had learned after blogging for a decade. After five more years, not a lot has changed. It is still hard to be consistent with creating content regularly. I continue to make myself notes of inspiration or ideas, but as most writers lament, it still boils down to butt in the seat, hands on the keyboard.
Perhaps the most exciting thing that’s happened in five years is that I had a post go viral – as the digital marketers call it. In June 2019, I wrote about my dislike of Where the Crawdads Sing. Turns out, a lot of people agreed with me. That post has had (as of this month) more than 154k views. It pushed my blog to 3 – 6k visitors a month for a couple of years, and monthly visitors remain higher now than before that post. (So thanks to you who evidently found a kinship in literary opinions and have stuck around.)
Returning to the theme of “content is hard”, I did recently launch a new idea of book briefs – a shorter take on a longer read. This is meant to give myself permission to share just a thought or two about a recent read without the pressure of a full-blown 500-word review. We’ll see if it gets me publishing more frequently. That’s the goal anyway.
WordPress is constantly reminding me to use Content AI – which I have no intent of ever using. I imagine many blogs will since it sorta solves the problem of coming up with creative content, but that would defeat this blog’s purpose (see #2 on my list of ten from my post 10 years ago). I truly hope that isn’t one of my updates after another five years.
So, here’s to 15 years of blogging! Break out the crystal and let’s celebrate!
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