Book Blogging Then vs. Now: How Blogging Has Changed

Hi friends! 👋🏻 So, I disappeared again but I have been so busy with work things that I think it’s completely justified. The beginning of summer turns out to be a very busy time for library staff, especially those who are part of the team that is planning things related to the Summer Reading Challenge. Hopefully I’ll be able to figure out a good schedule for blogging, but we shall see.

If you didn’t know already, I have been a book blogger for almost eleven years. And in those eleven years, I’ve seen a lot of things and a lot of changes. Most of them are good changes, and I have yet to see any catastrophically bad changes and I hope I never do. Reflecting on how book blogging used to be is a fun thing because sometimes it’s nostalgia but I can also look back and see how things have changed for the better.

posts

Then: When I first started blogging, pretty much every book blog focused 95% on reviews. Some blogs only posted reviews and hauls and nothing else. There were obviously memes thrown into the mix like Waiting on Wednesday and Top 10 Tuesday (which are still going strong) but the big focus was on reviews.

One thing that sticks out in my memory is this kind of unspoken expectation for bloggers to post every day of the week. I remember one blogger posting every single day in 2012 and getting so much praise for it that I tried my hand at posting every day. It didn’t go well because I got burnt out very quickly and ended up taking more hiatuses than I do now. The big problem with this was that if you’re like me and you don’t read multiple books in a week, you end up with not a lot of books to review and rely on memes instead.

Now: While there are still blogs that focus mainly on book reviews and recommendation posts, I see a lot more variety in posts now. Memes do still exist and are popular, but it can be difficult for a new one to get off the ground, so WoW and TTT still reign supreme there.

We now have more posts that are about finding books from authors who are from marginalised groups, which is something that will always be important because no matter how much people will try to complain that “nobody wants to read books by cishet white people anymore”, there will always need to be more effort put into reading diversely, and book bloggers do a fantastic job of encouraging that.

diversity

Then: I was 16 when I started blogging and for a while, it really felt like I was the youngest person in the community even though I knew that wasn’t true (I’ve seen bloggers as young as 10). And while a lot of bloggers were adults (reviewing YA books, but that’s nothing new) something else I noticed is that the vast majority of bloggers I encountered back then were white. The Asian blogging community has always been there and is still going very strong, but most of the bloggers I followed were white cishet women.

Books didn’t feel as diverse as they are now either. The big dystopian craze was happening in my early days and the publishing industry felt so white and cishet that reading “diversely” meant reading a book with a gay white boy as the protagonist as opposed to a white straight girl. When we started paying more attention to books with POC protagonists, I realised just how undiverse my reading habits had been. I don’t really want to read about characters who are like me anymore.

Now: To me, the blogging community feels so much more diverse now than it has ever been. We have bloggers from so many different places, of different ethnicities, we have more gender diversity and more queer bloggers than ever before. And something that really sticks out to me is how there are more teen bloggers now than there were when I was a teenager.

The fact that there are so many teen bloggers now is important to me because they are the people who we really should be listening to when it comes to YA books. They are the target demographic and know what it is that teenagers want to read about, as opposed to grown adults who can’t relate to a protagonist who is a junior in high school and has problems that a regular teenager has.

Books are miles more diverse than they were in the past. We have so many more authors of colour who write about characters who look like them and they’re not just writing contemporary books like they would have done in the past. Fantasy and sci-fi were so white in the past and now we have stories that are inspired by so many different cultures as opposed to the classic Western European fantasy setting. I still remember when the Grishaverse felt like something new and fresh because Ravka is based on Russian and Slavic folklore.

platforms

Then: One way to make a veteran blogger shudder is to mention using Blogger. Back in the early 2010s, if you weren’t on Blogger, you were likely self-hosted with WordPress. Google made so many changes to the Blogger platform that there was a mass migration of bloggers to self-hosted WordPress and I remember seeing so many posts about the migration process and tutorials and people advertising their services. Of course, almost everyone was an adult back then so they could afford to do it. I was using Blogger until 2016 when I switched over to self-hosted and I’ve never gone back, not even when I started this blog fresh.

Now: Nobody really uses Blogger as a blogging platform anymore. If you’re a new blogger starting out, you’re likely to go straight to free WordPress. And while I appreciate the freedom that Blogger gives with customisation, it can sometimes feel like there’s no community. You don’t get any notifications when someone replies to your comment, following just doesn’t exist anymore since Google Friend Connect and Google Reader got shut down, and it doesn’t even have Feedburner anymore.

drama

Then: Book blogging drama used to be wild. I’ve seen plagiarism scandals, authors harassing bloggers over negative reviews, and the biggest one of all: when one author thought it was a good idea to stalk a blogger and show up at their house because she didn’t like their review of her book. This author then called herself a ‘crazy stalker’ in the title of her book of essays and the fact that it still happened is scary. Make no mistake though: that author is not a victim of “cancel culture”, they’re a bully who couldn’t handle criticism.

Now: Blogging drama now is kind of the same old same old: an author gets exposed for having some extremely horrible beliefs about marginalised groups, craps out a terrible half-apology, lays low for a bit, releases another book. Lather, rinse, repeat. If I do hear of any drama or controversies related to bookish creators as opposed to authors, it’s nothing to do with book bloggers but on Twitter, YouTube or TikTok. Book bloggers have always been chill for the most part and if there’s a controversy in the blogging community, it’s usually something pretty bad.

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How long have you been blogging? Have you seen any changes since you first started?