Let’s Talk About… Blogging Fatigue and Book Collecting

Hi everyone!

If anyone has been checking in with my blog on a semi-regular basis you may have noticed that I’ve not been posting on a regular basis until very recently. I’ve redesigned my site to try and motivate me to do more blog posts, because I’d love to get back into it. Blogging is an amazing way of keeping up with the YA book community, of learning all the latest news and sharing your ideas. Without blogging, I definitely felt like I was behind on just about everything. For a while, I felt like I was missing out on a lot of new books, as well as more opportunities to meet new people via the internet, and talk to my friends about what we’ve been reading recently. I did consider just coming back in and starting it up again, but then I got to thinking about all the reasons why I felt so unmotivated to write. Was it just a lack of ideas? A busy schedule that was keeping me from reading? A feeling that my blog didn’t look the way I wanted it to? And when I really started to think about it, I realised that there were a lot of factors that were creating barriers in my head, and I feel like it might be helpful to talk candidly about this a little bit.

I want to preface this talk by saying that a lot of these issues are my own. And a lot of the things I’ve learned about myself during this hiatus make me realise that I think I need to change my habits a bit if I want to avoid more burnouts in the future. What I’m trying to say here, in a very inelegant way, is that there are moments in this post where I’m going to be a little critical of how I feel content creating in the YA book community works, but I’m not trying to criticise individuals who might thrive in the same environment. Everyone works differently. But I feel like this break from blogging has made me more aware of some of the issues I have with how content creating tends to work, and the kinds of expectations I’ve been placing upon myself because I look around and can see what others are achieving. I’ve always been a very ambitious person. In fact, I recently had CBT therapy to talk about my anxiety, and how a lot of my perfectionism comes from heaping a lot of expectations on myself. So again, I just want to point out that I’ve come to the realisation that the way I have been book blogging hasn’t been great on my wellbeing or mental health, but that doesn’t mean that others should read this and second-guess what they’re doing if it works for them. I guess I’m mostly just writing this because I feel like there might be some people out there who do maybe sometimes feel the same way as I have over the past few months, and who may find this ramble somehow useful. It’s also just kinda therapeutic to write it all out.

Part of the reason why I’ve been taking a break is because of my thesis work. I’m currently working on a PhD that examines trends and tropes in Young Adult fantasy novels since 2005. Unsurprisingly, this involves me reading a lot of YA books, as well as a bunch of theory and other texts that help me make my arguments in my writing. It can be pretty exhausting, if I’m being honest. For several years, I’ve been writing this 100,000 word monstrosity, all while trying to attend conferences, write journal papers, critique others’ work, and everything else that my work requires. My work is funded, meaning that I get paid my wages so long as I keep handing in work and don’t give up on my thesis. As you can probably imagine, it can get pretty tough, and I feel like packing it in from time to time. This has definitely been made more stressful by the pandemic. In part because I’m working from home all the time, which is what I’d be doing anyway, but now I feel less motivated and keep having to remind myself not to procrastinate. And in part, because a lot of doors have closed as a result of a lack of funding and universities cutting back on employment opportunities. There were a lot of people in my office who pretty much never slept because they poured their whole lives into their work, and they still struggled to get a job in the midst of everything going on. That prompted me to feel like I have to try even harder with my own work, or risk falling behind. It’s been very anxiety-inducing, and I’m still coping with a lot of the issues that this additional pressure has added to my work-life, which is one of the reasons why I’ve felt a bit guilty about blogging. On the one hand, blogging is actually something my university has encouraged me to do, because it keeps me involved in the industry. Ideally, I’d love to one day work as an editor, and again having an online presence is great for those kinds of career prospects. But at the same time, feeling like blogging is yet another component of my work-life has taken some of the polish off it. It makes it feel like it’s something I have to do, rather than something I want to do. I’m probably really shooting myself in the foot by saying this, but I promised a candid talk about it.

One of the other reasons I gave up on blogging for a few months is also that it’s a lot of work. I know again that I’m probably putting a lot of this on myself, but it feels like if you want to get your blog noticed and gain followers and views on your site, then you really need to be promoting yourself, talking to others, reading and boosting other peoples’ blogs, and creating content frequently enough to hit algorithms and not make people look elsewhere for reviews of new books. And that means being able to keep up with a lot of the newest books, making sure that you’re reviewing them either ahead of the curve, or at least at the same time as others do. The ability to get hold of ARCs is of course, a privilege, and I’m really grateful that I’ve built up my platform enough to get hold of some books before they’re even released. But at the same time, all of this can add a lot of guilt and pressure on you as a content creator, because you have to be reading fast enough and posting often enough to keep up with where you feel everyone else is. And of course, you’re only seeing the stuff that people are sharing online. It can be airbrushed and mediated, and you don’t get to see how much time and effort that others have put into their posts. So you end up judging yourself according to the glimpses you get into others’ lives, and wondering why it feels hard for you when it looks effortless for others. And I know, taking a step back, that this isn’t the case. But at the time, I felt like I wasn’t good enough to be blogging, I wasn’t interesting enough to build the connections that others seemed to be forming, and I was a terrible person for promising to read so many ARCs and then not getting to them, or reviewing them months after I planned to review them. It was getting to the point where I was getting frustrated with myself for not reading books at the speed I used to before university, which is just not something I’m capable of doing anymore. And it took a while for me to recognise that I’m just not able to read at the same speed that I used to, and so I’ve had to adjust my expectations. That might mean my blog doesn’t grow at the rate I imagined it would when I first started out, but I think it’s important to make sure that I’m not caught up in reading because I have to, but that I’m reading because I want to.

The last reason is because my financial situation has changed. I’m getting towards the end of my thesis now, and by this time next year it should hopefully be submitted and I’ll be looking for jobs. As I’ve already noted in this very long ramble, that’s a bit harder now, than it was a few years ago. The goalposts keep shifting, and so I’m trying my best to ease some of that inevitable stress on myself by making sure that I have enough savings built up that I can manage paying rent and bills and things for a little while if there’s a gap between finishing my thesis and getting a job. I’m fortunate that I have a wonderful partner who is very supportive of me, and who is potentially in a position where he can shoulder more of the financial burden if that time comes, but I also really don’t want to rely on him and feel like I’m not bringing my share to the table. And so I’ve been a lot more careful about how many books I buy this year. Which is probably a good thing, because my shelves are starting to look a little full. My breaking point came a few weeks ago when I considered treating myself to some new books. I thought about getting them all on kindle, to save some shelf space, but then immediately discredited this idea because physical books look so much better in a haul photo. Again, I think there’s a bit of an expectations of content creators to haul a lot of books. There are blog posts and booktube videos and Instagram posts devoted to hauls, and again a lot of the really popular content creators across a lot of platforms are ones who just so happen to haul huge amounts of books per month. Hauls also gain a lot of attention, a lot of views and comments. So again, it’s been a bit strange taking a step back from all that and wondering if it’s really something that actually makes me happy, or if it’s something that has become a bit of a bad habit. My shelves are full of books I haven’t read. I’m not lacking in novels I can pick up. It would probably take me a whole year or more to get through them all. So while I’m not going to deprive myself of more books in the future, I’m definitely going to try and be more strict with my book-buying budget and try and worry less about whether or not I’m keeping up with all the latest releases.

I think a lot of book community stuff can get to become about jealousy, in some ways. You get a little jealous that another person who started out earlier than you has already got double your following. You get jealous that the popular channels on YouTube seem to be hauling about 80 books a month, and half of those are gifts from publishers. You get a little jealous that someone else got to work with this author, or on this tour, or event, or got nominated for this award. And obviously, a tiny smidge of jealousy can be a good thing—it can help to push you to try harder. But at the same time, I think there’s moments where the YA community as a whole can become a bit too fixated on who has the most books, who owns the most special editions, who gets to work with the biggest authors. And it can disillusion you, if you spend too much time queuing up a bunch of BookTube hauls, or watching people with a billion subscribers get to go on set of the latest TV show adaptation. Imposter Syndrome is probably at the root of all of this, at least for me. I have a lot of self-confidence issues, and sometimes it’s hard to remember that I am part of this wonderful community of people. Content creation is great, because it feels accessible. Blogging, in particular, feels accessible because for the most part all you need to do is have access to books and a free blogger or wordpress site. It’s one of the reasons so many people try and be influencers at the moment, because it feels like it’s something that’s just within reach. And if for whatever reason you can’t keep up with the demands of it, it can feel like it’s your fault for not being good enough. And I guess what I’m here to say today, if people have followed on to the end of this ramble is that it’s important to create content because you want to, and it’s important to create it in a way that is good for you, as an individual, even if that doesn’t reflect what other people in the community are doing.

So, I think, going forwards, I’m going to try and keep up with a reasonable blogging schedule. I’m going to try and limit my expectations of myself, and not feel guilty if I don’t find enough time to read, or post, or if I need to take a short break for my wellbeing. I’m going to try and post more about books that I have and have read, rather than books that I feel will be popular and get my posts more views. And I’m going to try my best not to compare myself to others as much. Because I don’t know anything about them, except what I can see on the screen and maybe the odd glimpses of these people across a convention room floor. And again, this isn’t meant to be a snide critique of the YA community or the blogging community or anything like that. It’s just me trying to understand why I’ve been so hard on myself for the past few months, and setting boundaries to help myself adjust back into blogging by minimising my chances of burning out again.

Anyhow, that’s quite enough of me rambling. I just think that it’s sometimes important to share these things.

How is everyone else feeling this week? Have you ever felt the same way about Blogging? Let me know in the comment section down below <3