PAGE TURNINGS
FOUR
GOOD-BYE OLD FRIENDS
BOOK BLOGGING SOCIAL MEDIA
Hello, beautiful Book Dragons and lovely Library Lions! I realized the other day that my Tell Me Tuesday posts are now the only regular book posts here on the blog. I was thinking I needed a general book chat feature because there are times when I have thoughts of the literary kind, and bookish questions I'd like to ask. Adding these to my TMT posts would make them too long. So here we are... let's chat my friends!
•
*image*
I've been book blogging for ten years come September and I've seen a lot of changes in the community. The first time I downsized on social media was about three years ago when I went from approximately 500 Goodreads friends to 150 in number. I had all these random people showing up in the rotating "friends" sidebar who weren't bloggers, nor what I used to call "super readers" when I first started on Goodreads. They were clogging up my home page feed, and most times not reading genres I was interested in. I wasn't seeing as much of other book bloggers and the indie/self-pub authors I was friends with.
First I went through and got rid of all the non book bloggers who weren't authors, publishers, super readers, former book bloggers, or IRL friends; specifically the ones who never interacted with me. That took me down to around 300 friends.
•
I sat at that number for about a year and then I decided I would take it down to 150 in number. I basically dumped everyone who never interacted with me regardless of who they were.
•
About a month ago I perused my friends list again and said good-bye to IRL friends who still had the same book on their "currently reading" shelf from nine years ago, ha ha, authors who aren't writing anymore, and book bloggers who stopped blogging whom I'm not currently Facebook friends with.
•
I'm down to eighty-eight Goodreads friends, now. Almost 100 percent of them interact with me at least a little bit, or are bloggers who frequent my blog. It's cozy and nice. It's really socializing and isn't that why it's called social media?
Twitter is not what it used to be with author interaction and long book topic discussion threads, but that's another post I'm working on. Before the 2016 elections I had close to 2K followers. After posting about that orange guy who won, in a year's time I went down to 746 followers. That number is forever burned into my brain. I refuse to believe that many readers/authors/publishers were his supporters, so I'm guessing they didn't like the political content, but geesh... there is a mute button for goodness sake!
•
A good number of book bloggers on Twitter who used to be Young Adult readers have become exclusively Contemporary Romance readers/influencers, which seems to go hand in hand with posting a million times a week, but I only mute them, that way they don't lose a follower.
•
I built back up to around 1.3K, but now that people like me are getting braver with their "unpopular" opinions (in quotes because many times it is actually the popular opinion, but people have been afraid of getting dragged and dog-piled), the unfollowings have started again and I'm back down to 1,084. I don't spend much time there anymore. I only get about eighty blog hits a month from Twitter, anyway, and frankly I think I enjoy Instagram a lot more at this point.
•
Anyway... I have a Twitter "list" of core bloggers/authors I follow and I pared that down considerably yesterday. I didn't unfollow anyone, but the Romance spammers had to go bye-bye. It's sad because I used to have some wonderful YA book conversations with most of them back in the day. One of the Romance spammers said it's now her mission to make Romance the most popular genre in literature, and to make people realize it is truly Literary Fiction. Oof...
•
She was also the one who said she was "well read" because she read nearly 300 books, paperback Romance novels, last year. I posted the definition of "well read" on her tweet and she blocked me. Buh-bye.
•
I don't have anything against people who read a steady diet of Romance; just stay in your own lane.
*image*
And speaking of Romance... it has also affected my blog hopping and Bookstagram scrolling. At one point early this year I realized that I was spending way too much time going to blogs, which had changed from mostly YA context to basically 100% Contemporary Romance content, and trying to think of relevant comments to make about books when I had zero percent interest. This was taking time away from being able to have longer discussions about books I am interested in on other blogs. In fact, I would read blogs and not comment, telling myself I would come back when I had time for a proper in-depth reply, and then, of course, never finding that time.
•
I've been slowly breaking this vicious circle, so if you don't have much non-Romance content on your blog, you probably won't be seeing me around. If you do comment here I will find something to say on your blog because I'm all about the "comment for comment" ideal, but no more four-eight comments per comment for romancers.
As I have said before there are bloggers I interact with better on other social media than on their blogs; for some it's Twitter, others it Goodreads, Instagram or a combination. On Bookstagram I have found a bounty of readers of: classics, Science Fiction, Fantasy, social justice and environmental Nonfiction, and traditional Literary Fiction; who don't have blogs. Some may be BookTubers or they're on BookTok, but for many on Bookstagram it's their only reading social media. I don't care for BookTube or BookTok, so it's a perfect place for me. There are also people who are just readers, good old-fashioned readers who do zero hype or promotion, and I love that. I have some of the best book conversations with them, and I get the heads up on a lot of vintage and obscure titles. There also seem to be more readers of Middle Grade on Instagram, too, something you all know is dear to my heart!
•
IG also has a "mute" function, so I can mute the pureblood romancers and not have to unfollow. If they comment on a post of mine, I can go look at their account in grid view and easily pick out images I can find something to say about. So... you will be seeing less and less of me on Twitter and more activity from me on Instagram. I basically only use Twitter for direct messaging other bloggers, now, and doing buddy reads.
How has your social media presence changed over the years?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank-you for dropping by! I love to chat, so comments get a lot of love.