First Blogiversary | Sharing My “Blogging Journey”

It has been exactly a year ever since I published my first post. It has been exactly a year ever since I decided to pursue this crazy idea to start a book blog.It has been exactly a year and OH MY GOD I’M STILL HERE.

Hey there! ✨✨✨

As you can tell today geniereads is celebrating its very first blogiversary! I know so exciting right? Such a milestone! Lol, but seriously I would have never thought that I’ll make it this far. I don’t know if my “blogging journey” or basically my experience is that interesting but that’s what I’m going to share to you today.

So here’s some virtual cookies 🍪🍪🍪, sit back and let’s start this story from…

I feel like I have already talked about why I started my blog a couple of times, so I’ll keep it short with this equation:

When I started I had no clue that this community was so BIG, actually I still had no idea about its vastness until I joined Twitter on September, the first blogs that I found were from the “bookstagrammers” that I was following. Yup, I discovered book blogs through bookstagram and I’m not even a part of it—I just really like looking at pretty book pictures. Anyways, so I began working on my blog and editing graphics and drafting a first post and the rest was history.

I never thought that actual people would start following me and reading my content. I swear this community is just so nice because people were welcoming me and it was just amazing. The first week was just me going from blog to blog, reading different posts and thinking that, “WOW THESE ARE MY PEOPLE” because it’s seriously a bibliophile’s haven! As you can tell I quickly fell in love with book blogging and the community, I was inspired to read, write, and I was putting up content consistently.

My first two months was a breeze, I was reading a good number of books, interacting with bloggers from different parts of the world, getting positive feedback. I think I had around 300+ followers by the start of June, I actually didn’t care for my stats that time. I thought having 2000+ views a month was like a regular thing, uhm yeah that’s what I thought.

I guess my blog “developed” pretty fast and that’s why it also went down pretty fast. So after two months of blogging, July hit me with reality really hard. My summer is over and school was starting get hectic, schoolwork ate all of my time. So studying, reading, and blogging plus other real life responsibilities—it was overwhelming.

My stats went down immediately, I only got 400+ views for the whole month of July, and I don’t even care about my stats the sad thing was I only published two blog posts. I haven’t lost the drive to blog, I just didn’t have the time to blog. Like I said I was overwhelmed with all these things I needed to do, and I’m not the most organized person. I suck at time-management, I’m barely making it through my schoolwork so I really didn’t have time for my blog.

This continued on until January 2017, I still managed to post 2-3 times a month and they were mostly just book reviews. And that was okay, I actually made this blog to share my #feels for the books I’ve read. But I want to share that for most of these months, time management wasn’t my only problem.

I actually suffered from a really big blogging burnout. From August to November, I just couldn’t get back into blogging. I lost the drive to put up content, to bloghop, to comment or reply to comments—it was definitely a dark time. Whenever I had some free time I’ll spend it doing anything expect blogging, sometimes I couldn’t even open my WordPress app. I didn’t want to delete my blog, I just didn’t want to continue it anymore.

I feel like that burnout was a result of many things. First is Twitter, I made a bookish account last September and it showed me a whole new side of the community. At Twitter I saw how big book blogging is, because at WordPress I only saw blogs using this platform but on Twitter I met bloggers who use blogspot, blogger, etc. and I also saw a how ugly it can really be. The thing is, everyone has been nice to me here at my little bubble but when I got to Twitter I saw a lot of misunderstandings, flame wars, etc. which is actually pretty common on the internet but seeing this made me reluctant to actually post content in fear of offending someone. I know, it’s just me overthinking but I lost the drive to post more original stuff because (a) I might say something wrong or cause misunderstandings, (b) I can’t help but think that it’s already been said and done by someone before, (c) I felt intimidated and irrelevant and so small.

Anxiety and overthinking just killed my will to blog, I spent as little time as possible in the community.

But enough of that, thankfully with the help of all the bookish gods out there I recovered from that phase and started blogging more consistently again by January 2017. And with more consistently I mean an average of 5 posts per month, but bear with please I’m not the best book blogger here. So yeah I regained the drive and joy of blogging and writing posts, plus at that time it was almost the end of the school year meaning it was much less hectic. I was back at it again with the reading and blogging. Not so much with the blog hopping, I still don’t have the will to constantly check out other blogs but that talk is for another post.

Anyways, I’m just really happy and surprised that I made it this far. ONE YEAR OF BARELY BLOGGING. And what I achieved from this year is so much more than I expected, to be honest I never thought of having 100 followers and now I have 800+ lovely followers! And it’s not just the followers, I have met (well not in person but still) and interacted with some many awesome people who inspire me everyday. I have learned and grown so much through this little experiment of mine, who would have thought that I would be talking with publishers and authors through email (this sounds very adult to me sorry haha) for months already? It still feels so surreal every time I receive a bookmail or whenever I get a really positive comment from one of you or whenever someone follows me—all these big and little things are what I treasure the most. And I hope my book blogging journey does not end here!

For the next chapter, of course you all are still part of the narrative. I don’t have much concrete plans for geniereads yet but I guarantee that more book reviews and inconsistent posts will come your way.

That’s right I still don’t have a strict schedule on posting, I don’t think I’ll ever develop one, but I’ll try my best to put up more posts other than reviews. Like I said, wrap-ups and reviews are still constant, but I like to focus more on bringing back my Genie Shares feature where I talk about blogging and bookish stuff/discussions that are important to me. I actually have a lot of topics/ideas for this, I just don’t have the time and attention-span it write the all (because, you know I’ve got so many books to read!!)

Another feature that I’m thinking of more focused about being a Filipino blogger. So a great number of my views are from the Philippines, and I wanted to share to all of you more of my nationality and what it’s like being a Filipino blogger. This is not strictly for Filipinos only, in fact I want it to be a feature where international bloggers can share their experiences, struggles, culture, etc. I don’t know when my first post about this will be live but I just need a name for the feature and then I’ll give it a go!

So far that’s all I’m planning for my blog, the main thing is that I just want it to stay alive and that would be enough.

AGAIN THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR BEING WITH ME ALONG THIS JOURNEY!! I just want to throw give all the exclamation points and cookies and books and everything wonderful to all of you just to express my gratitude!!!! You have no idea how much this blog and you. my readers and blogger-friends, mean to me. Being able to achieve this milestone just proves that book blogging is definitely worth all the stress and struggle that it gives. I don’t know what to say anymore so I’ll just say THANK YOU for one last time! 💞💞💞

Hope that you’re having a great day today, happy reading and blogging! 

Please do leave any comments, thoughts, messages, reactions, and/or suggestions! Thank you for reading.

Until next time,

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