This week‘s Let’s Talk Bookish comes courtesy of Nicole @ Thoughts Stained with Ink:
Imagine you’ve spent several hours, even days, perfecting a post that you’re so excited to publish. Finally, you hit publish and eagerly await the response. But the response is not as much as you’d expected, or worse, it’s nonexistent. Has that happened to you before? How do you handle poor post results? Do you think there’s usually a cause for poor post results?
I think that this happens to everyone at one time or another. People get busy, and expecting everyone to be available to read your post, you know, timely, is setting yourself up for failure.
The truth—well, my truth—is that you can’t do this for the responses anymore than you should buy Christmas presents expecting presents in return.
So, again for me, I don’t do this for you guys. I do it for me. I love every response that I get, and I am so happy to have met so many crazy book lovers like me, some of whom I consider friends. But I write for me. I don’t write for them.
I write because I love talking about books. I write because it makes me happy.
So, if there’s a post that gets no engagement, well. I’ll notice, sure. I might think “Well, that sucks. I thought folks would get a kick out of it. Oh, well.”
And then I move on. Because the real fun—the writing—was already had.
Now, my IRL friends, the five that actually read the blog (which is another rant for another day) are going to say “but you market the SHIT out of that blog. Why do you do that if you don’t want readers?”
Of course I want readers. I started this to have conversations about books, and conversations with my golden retriever aren’t productive or useful.
So, yes. I market. I treat this like a job, and I work hard at it. I want readers.
But I don’t need them.
Still love you guys, though, and wish I could give you some of the chocolate peanut butter chip cookies I made last night. 💕
The Let’s Talk Bookish meme is hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books & Dani @ Literary Lion.
fifty-two 
I love this! And it’s so true!
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So true. I always laugh too when people say why did my post I was proud of get almost no response, and then something I just threw together got a ton of comments? You just never know. 🙂
Same though. You just gotta move on. Interesting point about the writing being the thing. I hadn’t thought of it quite like that…
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I’d hope everyone would be attentive enough readers to notice the unsubtle difference between can live without readers, and don’t want readers.
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Great post! This is something that happens to me a lot, especially after I took a hiatus and started posting again a few months ago. There are moments when I can just shrug it off and move forward and do my thing because like you said, I blog because I enjoy sharing my thoughts about books and engaging with others! But sometimes it is easier said than done when you think that a post will resonate with others and it just doesn’t 😂
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I’ll be honest—it’s extra frustrating with the Let’s Talk Bookish posts, because I think that their prompts are so well thought-out and yet they don’t seem to be getting any traction right now. I mean, the Top Ten Tuesday posts usually have between 80 and 120 linkbacks, and the Let’s Talk Bookish posts seem to get fewer than 10 most of the time. And I love writing them, but I hate that so few people see them. I think that Dani and Rukky deserve more eyeballs on their project.
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I completely agree! I don’t blog for others, I blog for me. I like to write my thoughts down and send them out into the void. If I get responses, I’m excited. I love to talk about books with people too, but lack of responses won’t stop me from sharing my thoughts.
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I completely agree with this–and yet I do find myself getting caught up sometimes in that self-indulgent sulking at lack of engagement! Remind me to keep thinking of this every time the strop sinks in, haha!
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I will!
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