Hello readers!
I just realized it’s been 4 years today since I started this blog! Yay me! Queen of commitment, consistency and quality content (please stop laughing). I love blogging. I love reading. I really hope I will keep book blogging for a long time, and right now I have found a good system that works for me and I find joy in the way I blog. So I thought I’d share my terrible system with all of you!
There are THOUSANDS of book blogs, and each of us have such distinct personalities and ways to stay organized. I love seeing people talk about how they do their scheduling, how often they post, how much time they spend blogging etc, so I thought it would be a cool idea to write this post as a mix of discussion and tips. I don’t expect my tips will work for everyone, I think I’m actually a bit of an exception when it comes to the way I do blogging – I am more of a “write all my posts for the week in a day” kind of blogger, I love starting and not finishing posts right away and tend to not do much editing work. It just works for me – I like doing all the work in one go for hours than a little bit every day during the week; this stimulates my writing and creativity brain cells and I tend to write more creatively like this. On the other hand, this means I often spend half my Sunday blogging instead of, I don’t know, getting a life or something.
1. I write down my main impressions about a book on my phone or journal
Because I tend to do all my blogging on Saturdays or Sundays, this means I end up writing reviews for books days (sometimes weeks) after I’ve read them. I don’t review every single book I read, but still it’s hard to keep up. The details of what I read and my impressions start to fade pretty quickly. For this reason, I do two things to make sure my thoughts are fresh when I am ready to review:
- I use either my journal or my phone’s notes app to jot down my main thoughts while I read the book, OR:
- I sometimes will also sneak in other books in my reading week so that I finish the book I want to review closer to the reviewing day. I know, basically cheating.
2. I like to have dozens of drafted posts in different stages of readiness
To me, this has several advantages:
- it helps me quickly write down some ideas for a post before I forget;
- it gives me time mature my thoughts with no pressure to finish or polish my writing (I speak ESL, so I’m quite paranoid about sounding silly in English);
- it takes off the pressure of coming up with new posts every week, because if I have no books to review or no time/energy/creativity to come up with a new post, I can just post a draft that is basically ready;
- it helps me stay motivated to keep blogging, because I have something to look forward to posting.