What do you think a successful book blogger looks like? Do you think you’re successful? Or do you think you’ve not quite reached that line of success yet?
Success to a lot of us probably looks a little like this: over 500 followers on the blog, maybe 1K? Over 1K on social media and for there to be regular engagement across all your platforms? Reaching 20k yearly views on the blog as well maybe…maybe that’s what success looks like to you? At least… that’s what we’re going with today.
Before I get into this post, let’s just remind ourselves of the definition of success.
Sometimes in our fast-paced culture, I feel like we forget to stop, breathe and actually reflect on things. Including the actual dictionary definition of certain words.
Definition of Success:
Noun. the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.
Success is whatever you make it in my opinion.
Success isn’t numbers or stats, not to me anyway. I’d rather have people who genuinely like my content on my blog/Twitter/Instagram follow rather than they follow because they want me to follow them back. I don’t do follow for follows. If I follow you, it’s because I want to see more of your content, not because I expect a follow back. It’s easy to get lulled into following people back on Twitter; I used to do it at the beginning, mostly due to feeling it was expected from me. I stopped following people back unless their profile genuinely piqued my interest.
Success is being able to feel proud of what you’ve done.
Who cares if Josie from Books and Treasure (ahem that person and blog is made up off the top of my head.) has 3K followers on Twitter and 1K on her blog. So what? She’s not you, lovely.
It’s human nature to want to compare ourselves to others. When we see people doing better than us, we get a wee bit jealous. We want what they have – we want to be as successful as Josie. What we didn’t know about Josie is that she doesn’t feel successful. She feels lonely because everyone sees the numbers and whilst they comment and interact with her, she’s not really got any friends online these days because well… her success may make her appear as part of an elite squad. Josie appears to have many friends already because of the high engagement levels and others may think she may not want any new friends.
We’re not numbers. We’re human.
In some way, we are all linked to the bookish community as book bloggers. That in its own right should be enough for us to chat with one another and support each other. Oh hey, this person just hit 100 followers on their blog whilst someone else just hit 700. Support them both – we all work hard. We all get lost along the way, questioning if we’ve wasted our time with a blog. Life throws rocks at us all and mental health all gets on top of us at times. No one in the blogging community is better than another. We are as bright as we choose to be. We’re as loud with our opinions as we want to be. If we want to be heard, then we’ll be heard, that is the power of the online world.
It’s the power of being friends with people who are in a similar position to you. We’re all just out there trying to get our voice heard, bobbing along in the digital void. We’re hoping we can spread our love of reading to others and that our words on a document can cause someone to think differently. We all hope one of our posts can resonate with someone, who needed to read those words at that point in time.
We are all successful book bloggers, in every way imaginable.
Clo is a 20-something book dragon from the UK, England primarily found on her own blog, Cuppa Clo. She studied Graphic and Digital Design. Sarcasm is her default, and she's addicted to tea. Oh, and she'd rather you didn't save her from a dragon.
She was also a Co-Founder of Bookend Events, a quarterly event with the aim to bring the bookish community, closer together.
I love this! When I first started blogging in 2012, I was really wrapped up in numbers and comparing myself to others. But, over the years, I’ve been happy feeling successful on my own. Great post. 🙂
Krystianna @ Downright Dystopian
This was such an important post for me. I’ve been not posting on my blog for a while because I lacked motivation but today I finally posted something! I would count that as a success today. Thanks for making this blog post!
This is such an awesome post! And I feel like it is super important to say, so kudos to you. Success is definitely how you feel, if you are happy with what you are doing and want to keep doing it than I would say you are successful!
I’m not crying, you’re crying!
But honestly, thank you Clo, it’s so easy to get caught up in numbers and stats and wonder if it’s all ‘paying off’ when you just have to remember it totally is as long as you’re enjoying it and should be proud of doing it in the first place.
Such a lovely post!
This is a great reminder. My blog may be small, but I am proud of what I do there. I like spreading the book love and seeing any author happy because I said something nice about their book is a great reward.
Ooh I really like how you took the definition of success and wrote this post along those lines. I never thought of success in the blogging world that way!
Totally agree that success is whatever you define it as! I know I’ll never be a big book blog, but I feel successful knowing that I have some devoted readers and people are taking recommendations from my reviews.
I love this so much! <3 It's certainly easy to fall into the trap of thinking you're not successful.
If success is “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose”, my original purpose in starting a blog was to give a spotlight to books that were under-hyped, AND to convince someone to give them a try. That didn’t go spectacularly well, but in a handful of cases, it worked. It’s still something to write in the win column!
It’s true though – we put too much stock in numbers. It’s also true that, as you say, maybe your fictional Josie doesn’t have many real friends despite having so many followers. And if we manage to hang on and blog away for better or for worse, we’re all successful, and we’re all superheroes. Not to mention all the friends we make, even with people who don’t read the same books as us (I have a few!). That, in itself, is success.
Success is absolutely about how you feel! I setup my blog as something to do for fun and I am having fun with it. So, I am a success 😉
This is such a fantastic post, Clo! I totally agree that success is something that each person will have to determine for themselves, but for me it is the level of connection that I have and the friendships that I’ve made. That was always the goal of my blog: to have a place to talk about books with other people that like books.