400 follower Q&A explaining the start of my blog and how it’s grown + post shout-outs (pt. 1 of 2)

What do you guys think???

I’ve done yet another blog redesign, but this time, I actually think it’ll last? I’ve said that every previous time, but let’s ignore that. I’ve been working on all the graphics, and the color scheme since around June, and I’m now finally publishing this! I’m so excited, and I actually really like the look of it, so I hope you guys do too. Let me know in the comments down below!!

And now to the normal intro of this post:

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Good morning my dear friends! I hope you have had a fantastic August. It’s so funny how weeks, months, and years fly by so fast, but then days take forever to end. And this lock-down is not helping things.

Nonetheless, hopefully this day will go pretty great since we’re starting it off with a 400 follower Q&A!! I am so happy to have reached this milestone, and I’m so thankful for every single one of you for following my little corner of ramblings and less than awesome designs.

Last week or so, I posted the 400 follower Q&A form for you guys to fill out, and I really appreciate all of you who did!! I’ve got a lot of questions, so I’ve decided to split this Q&A into two, this being the first part all about blogging, and then the next part will be about books, food, and my likes/dislikes.

This is going to be kind of long, so let’s get started!!

What inspired you to start the Lets Talk Bookish series?

A year and a month ago, I finally introduced LTB which is an idea I’d had for a long time. I had seen discussions being done on other blogs, and I loved reading them, but I was too nervous to write any discussions of my own.

My thinking was: Who would want to read my opinion? What could I possibly say that hasn’t already been said? What if my discussion flops?

And then I actually did go ahead and write a discussion back in January of 2019, because I found a topic that annoyed me enough to write about. That was about Bloglovin’ and how it showed your posts on their site, if you wanted it to be there or not. Things may have changed since then, so if you go read it, keep in mind that it’s close to two years old.

That post flopped. It really did. I didn’t get any comment on it until 4 months later. Of course, it was at the start of my blogging career, I didn’t have the community of commenters commentators? that I now have, but that seriously discouraged me.

In May 2019, I finally published another discussion about the Blood Heir controversy, and it did so much better. It still has a special place in my heart because it was my first discussion that I’m kind of proud of, and also the first one to do pretty well.

After that discussion, I was more convinced to do LTB, and after some prodding from my dad (he really wanted me to do it lol) I finally went ahead and announced LTB in late July, and officially started last August.

My little meme is over a year old. Time truly does fly by so fast.

What’s your greatest challenge and greatest success/favorite part when it comes to blogging?

I got two variations of this question, so I decide to combine them.

My greatest challenge is…

Drum roll please!!

*dun dun duhhhh*

…actually blogging?

Honestly, I’m pretty sure any blogger will tell you that the hardest part of blogging is blogging itself. The amount of time that goes into writing posts, editing posts, publishing posts, designing images for said post, replying to comments, blog hopping, keeping up with everything that’s going on and just surviving it all is unbelievable.

It’s energy draining, incredibly time consuming, and is currently very much my biggest challenge. Ever since school started, my posting has really declined. All what I did pretty much this past month was LTBs, and even those weren’t my best.

I was supposed to do the August edition of The Serotonin Monthly, but that is very time consuming and I haven’t finished it yet. I haven’t done a “reacting to my old…writing” post since June and I was supposed to have done at least 4 more of those since then. I intended to do a post sharing some diverse mysteries and thrillers, but it’s still in the draft phase as well. And the review that I was supposed to have written since is still sitting empty.

There is so much to do, and so little time. I really want a slow down button on life right now.

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Right now, I don’t feel like I have a blogging success, but there are parts that I absolutely love, number one of which is reading everyone else’s posts and comments.

I love reading all your amazing posts, like

• Chana & Malka’s hilarious urban dictionary,
• Veronika and Sabrina’s absolutely sweet co-blogger tag,
• Sumedha’s August wrap-up,
• Amena’s about book reviews,
• Marie’s on what we bloggers do,
• Clo’s on her blog hopping process (I need to start using Feedly lol),
• Cielo’s on what white authors get wrong with Latinx characters,
• Sammie’s on how biracial voices fit into the push for more #ownvoices books, and so many more.

You’re welcome; you now have some posts to go binge-read 🙂

Here’s the thing: I read most of you guys’s posts, and I do read all the comments you leave on my blog, and they truly make me so happy. The problem is in replying to them all and leaving thoughtful or not so thoughtful but totally gushy comments. I don’t want to just write, “Great post” or “Loved reading this!!” or something that’s pretty basic like that. But 3 paragraph comments take some time to write and with so many posts and comments, it’s just too much.

It’s my favorite part of blogging for me, but it’s also one of the most disappointing areas because I don’t do as well with it as I would hope to.

What inspired you start your blog / When did you know you wanted to start a blog?

I wasn’t really inspired to start this blog, nor did I have a specific light-bulb moment where I went, “Aha, I’m going to start my blog today!”.

I just did.

It’s one of the few things in my life that has been utterly and completely spontaneous. I don’t even remember if I’d seen any other book blogs which made me think it’d be cool to start one. I think that I first joined Goodreads, and then saw people linking their blogs in their profiles, so maybe that’s what happened.

Either way, I created my blog without much thought and that’s the sadly very uninteresting story behind it.

Are there any other blog names you came up with / planned to use before you went with the current one?

See above. I don’t even know why I picked eternity books, and was so determined to use it that I made my url eternitybooksreview.wordpress.com since eternitybooks.wordpress.com was already taken.

I don’t understand myself sometimes.

Advice I wish I had known when I started Blogging / My suggestions for bloggers

There are so many things that you can be doing with your blog rather than repeating the same old list memes every week. not that they are bad or anything; they are pretty neat. If you like them, then go right ahead

That is something I wish I had discovered much earlier. I don’t have to do Top Ten Tuesdays to grow my blog. Sure, it helps people find me, but I don’t have to create this rigid “everyday I post a different meme” schedule so that people will stay and read what I have to say.

Related: Discussion on blog schedules

If I do something “original” and “unique” once a week, people will be curious and stay, and more often than not, they’ll follow to see what I’ll do next. I don’t have to do the same thing every single week for people to enjoy my content, and I wish I had learned that earlier.

(And I put original and unique in quotes because honestly, all these ideas have already been done a million times over, but at the same time, it’s still unique to every blogger which makes it fun.)

BUT, I also saw someone comment something similar to this somewhere recently: it’s kind of better to post a lot when you first start, and then once you start getting the following, you can slow down. That way, your new posts will hook them and result in follows, and then they can go look through all those older posts that you first did. (Update: It was Sumedha who mentioned this in a comment on her life update post)

That makes a lot of sense and is probably a good idea, but I kind of still think it’s better to do more quality content from the start. We bloggers are patient people; if it takes you another year to do a similar post, we’ll probably still be here waiting.

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Another advice I’d give to any blogger is to have some sort of plan when it comes to your posts.

Write down all those ideas that come to you in the dead of night even if you don’t end up actually writing the posts until several months later. That way, when it’s been 5 months and you’re in a blogging slump (not that I’m saying you should be), you can go through those ideas and have some inspiration left.

I’m notoriously awful at writing things down. Positively awful. Partly because I’m lazy and partly because I’ll probably loose the paper or book that it was written on anyway. Yes, I’m that much of a mess irl. So I don’t write things down and I just rely on my memory, which has failed me time and time again, when I need post inspiration.

Obviously, that doesn’t work out 90% of the time, so please don’t be like me. Writing your ideas down can help you a lot when it comes to preparing or finding inspiration for posts.

And maybe you already do this so great job to you! I’m probably the only person who doesn’t do this lol

How do you balance blogging and school?

If these last few weeks have been any indication, I have no balance at all.

Honestly any advice I’d give would be generic: take notes, plan your time, get a calendar and write it all down, work ahead if you can, etc. and I don’t really want to do that since it’s not necessarily working for me, and it feels weird to be offering advice about something that I’m not even getting right myself.

But one thing I can say is, you need to know what your priorities are. If you’re stressing and you can’t handle blogging and school, well, school is the priority in that situation. If you have other commitments and by blogging, you’ll not be fulfilling those commitments, you need to rethink your priorities.

As much as it is painful to say this, my priority right now is school, and if I can’t find a balance between the two, I might just have to go on a hiatus till I can find some semblance of order in this hectic mess of life.

What are posts that you’re most proud of/Happy That you wrote?

I guess I’m proud of my discussions the most, specifically my discussion on the Blood Heir controversy, my recent one about not being sure of how to move forward with my responsibility as a blogger and reader, and my discussion on historical fiction and why I love it (including recommendations).

I also like my reacting to my old writing series because it’s pretty fun to be salty at my younger self.

Everything else is kind of eh. Generally, I don’t feel very proud of things that I do. Terrible I know, but it is what it is.

But you know what, here are some of the posts you guys loved these past few months:

• my nomination post for the 2020 BBAs & the first edition of the serotonin monthly
• my mid-year book freakout tag
• my discussions on morally grey characters & blog schedules

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That’s it for this part of the Q&A! I still have quite a number of questions left, and this post is long enough as it is. I promise, I’m going to try and make sure that part 2 comes within the next two weeks and not next year 😅

What do you guys think of the new design? Has your blog gone through many redesigns and renamings since the first time that you hit publish? What posts are you most proud of? Be sure to link them so I can check them out! How do you balance blogging and school/uni/work/life?? Share your thoughts down below!