I discovered this weekly meme through Sophie at Balivernes who visited my blog recently.  (Yes, I do wander around your sites when you visit mine)  I would encourage you to visit Rukky at Eternity Books and Dani at Literary Lion (our hosts for Let’s Talk Bookish) and learn more about them and this weekly event.  The sign-up page on Rukky’s site is HERE.  On Dani’s site, it’s HERE

Although this particular blog is relatively new (I do have 4 active blogs), I’ve been blogging for about 7 years now.  My main blog, Keeper Bookshelf, is 7 years old and my genre-specific, totally paranormal romance shifters site, Shifter Haven is about 6 years old.  I’ve recently added two newer blogs, this one, Happily Ever After Romance, and Paranormal-y Romantic (which will feature all different sub-genre Paranormal Romance novels).

So, I’m not new to this, still discovering and learning new things every month it seems.  And, oh yeah, there are definitely pros and cons to book blogging.

Let’s move on to the lists.

Pros of Book Blogging

• Community – the book world (sometimes referred to as Romancelandia) is, for the most part, a welcoming, informative, and caring group of people who truly love romance book (or any genre, really)
• Connecting with people – I’ve met so many people through my book review blogs, some have become real-life friends but all have added to my knowledge and experience of the book world and its diversity
• ARCs – I’ll say upfront that I’m not in this for the free books.  Oh, don’t get me wrong they are amazing and help stretch my personal book budget be able to pick up the other titles that I also want to read.  Being given the gift of permission to read a book ahead of its release is something I take very seriously.  I try my best to get reviews up before publication – but life happens at times so my self-made deadline on reviews is the publication week
• Sharing the books I love – perhaps the best thing about what I do is talking books with other readers, ones who absolutely love the book and those who just don’t get what is so great about it.  Both sides have valid reasons for their feelings, and it’s such fun to get caught up in that discussion

Cons of Book Blogging

• The numbers needed – Blog followers, page views, Twitter followers, any other platform followers… for some of the bigger publishing houses, it’s all about numbers and if you don’t have them, well, you’re not going to get ARCs from them.  There is one publishing house I would so love to be approved by for ARCs, to be auto-approved would be a dream come true – but I know it’s not likely to happen because I don’t have the very large number of followers they deem necessary.  Guess it’s a good thing that I buy their new releases each month and don’t hold a grudge, right?  🙂
• Getting caught up in the hype – It took me about a year to finally just say to myself (and believe it) that I do not have to love, like, or even remotely want to read the current best selling Romance novel.  I don’t.  The whole idea of creating the blogs was to read and talk about books that I love, no one else and I forgot that at first
• There are trolls around – Not everyone you’ll meet is going to be nice, some are outright nasty.  You simply have to develop your own unique way of dealing with the trolls, as I call them.  Those people who are never happy with a review, don’t know why you gave it a whatever number rating because the book certainly deserved (or didn’t deserve) another number.  A review is only one person’s opinion.  That is such a simple concept that people refuse to believe.  If you love a book… that’s great.  If I didn’t… that’s my opinion, not yours, and it’s also allowed.  Jeesh!

I’m sure there’s more on both the Pro and the Con side of book blogging but everyone is different, approaches their blog in their own unique way, and talks about those books in their own voice that reaches their particular audience.

I’m in this for the fun of it.  The sharing of book ideas.  The chance to meet new people who share something with me… a love of reading.  So, in the end, those Pros and Cons pretty much even out, in my opinion.  (and after all, it is my blog post – *grin*)