Akshay Kumar Das recently nominated me for the Blogger Recognition Award! This is a new one for me, so thank you so much! ❤
The rules:
- Thank the blogger who nominated you and provide a link to their blog.
- Write a post to show your award.
- Give a brief story of how your blog started.
- Give two pieces of advice to new bloggers.
- Select 2-3 other bloggers that you want to give this award to.
- Comment on each blog to let them know you have nominated them and provide the link to the post you created.
How my blog started:
I started on Tumblr in 2013 and, to be honest, I don’t really remember a lot of the specifics. I think that I’d won a book in a Goodreads giveaway and wanted a place to post my review. I stuck it out for a good four (almost five) years on Tumblr before deciding that I wasn’t getting the traffic or interaction that I wanted. I had been thinking about moving my blog to a different site for a while, but I’m pretty indecisive, so I didn’t do anything.
Fate intervened at the end of March by dumping like two feet of snow on New Jersey. Everything was a disaster because who expects two feet of snow at the end of March?? My manager was actually in Mexico so I made the call to close the office until everything was cleared up. I ended up stuck in my house by myself for… a long time. I was so bored that I just decided to take the jump, and I’m so glad I did! Everybody I’ve ever talked to on WordPress has been so wonderful and supportive.
Two pieces of advice:
Have fun with it. If you push yourself too hard or try to pump out too much content, you’re going to be miserable. Take a break if you need to. Remember that this isn’t your job — it’s your hobby — and it should make you happy.
Interact with other bloggers as much as you can. This was so hard for me when I moved over to WordPress! There was basically no interaction on Tumblr except for an occasional message and I hadn’t really done the whole internet friend thing since my emo high school days, so I was a little out of practice. I also have a lot of social anxiety and that can make striking up conversations with new people really stressful! But let me be clear: I’ve learned that I love talking with other book bloggers, and I have made actual friends that I talk to outside of this website, which is a thing that I cannot believe happened. So if there’s one piece of advice that I really hope you’ll take, it’s to step out of your comfort zone and talk with people. This is the best online community I have ever found.
The Bibliophagist 