Where did I go?

Hello fellow bookworms! Happy Spring!

I know I’ve been MIA for about a week or so and I’m here to address that.

Book Blogging is Hard….there I said it! Even though reading is something I do quite avidly; Blogging about books is something you need to practice. It takes discipline and determination. Not to mention, Planning.

Running a book blog is a part time job.

So why did I stop posting? Am I done with Book Blogging?

Absolutely not! I feel like I needed time to sort myself out, to set some goals for myself and rethink how I started. I had a lot of questions going through my head;

As a blogger: How could I make more engaging posts? How can I improve my book reviews? How can I be more involved with the Book Blogging Community? When is the best times to post? What type of tags/memes should I do so it doesnt seem redundant? How can improve my post writing?

As a Graphic Designer/Web Developer: Is my logo eye catching? Is my website user-friendly? Is my website name, my brand, good enough? Should I come up with another name? Should I change the font?

There were a million other questions and I kept thinking about them; I became stressed out and began to doubt myself, “Maybe Blogging isn’t for me?”

But I quickly diminished that thought. Blogging, Book Blogging especially, is something I’ve always wanted to do and be a part of. I quickly sat myself down and came up with a game plan.

1. Go on the Reader in WordPress and read other book bloggers’ posts. Doing this actually led me to DrizzleandHurricanebooks‘ post How do you like to interact with the book blogging community? It was an incredibly helpful post that helped me gauge how I could interact with the community myself. In the post, they actually ping back to a previous post they had written, How to Blog hop, why I do it and think you should too Which brings me to my second point:
2. Start Blog Hopping. In DrizzleandHurricanebooks‘ post they talk about what Blog Hopping is and bring up many valid points on why it could be beneficial. As someone who is completely new to this book blogging world, I found it incredibly helpful. It gave me some structure as to how I should take my first steps in this community.
3. Start an Editorial Planner. I’m not new to using planners. In fact, I have a possible issue with buying cute planners that I don’t really need. [Have you seen Happy Planners?] So I’m dusting off one of the ones that have been never used and beginning an Editorial Planner. This will help me come up with a game plan for when, what, and how I’ll make my posts. It will give me some sense of organization which in order to be disciplined, I think I need it.
4. Write my blog posts ahead of time. This is a huge issue for me. I’ve always been an in-the-moment writer. But one thing I’ve learned is that I need to schedule my posts ahead of time.
5. Re-Brand myself. I won’t be changing the name now but I think that I need to do more research into my website name. I’m content with the logo but I do realize I need to work a bit more on the font I’m using and how I’m laying my website out.

With that being said, I’ll be back to posting on my regular schedule. I hope I can grow and be more involved in the Community moving forward.

A very special thanks to DrizzleandHurricanebooks; The post on How do you like to interact with the book blogging community? was the first one on my reader today and I can’t help but think it was a small miracle.♥

Do you use an Editorial Planner? How do you interact with the Book Blogging Community? Share your tips with me below!

Jeimy