Wednesday Chatter: 8 Years Of Blogging And Reading (and counting)

Wednesday Chatter is a weekly feature at Ruby's Books where we'll be talking about anything and everything related to books and reading. Click here if you want to see what we talked about in the previous weeks

WARNING: Some bad words might be used in the following post. Don't say I didn't warn you!

Hello my fellow book lovers! Today's post was inspired by the fact that *surprise* my blog is 8 years old.

 

Source: Giphy.com

Well, more accurately, 8 years 3 months and 9 days old. Wow, time flies. I previously did something similar on a Wednesday Chatter post, where I talked about how blogging changed me. I kind of wanted to update on that post a little bit, since I feel like I've grown quite a lot since 2015, when that post was written, as a blogger, as a reader, and as a person in general. So without further ado, here's my celebratory post about

8 YEARS OF BLOGGING AND READING 

(and counting)

The major thing I changed in my blogging life, surprisingly, has nothing to do with actually blogging. It involves talking about blogging. I haven't been really vocal in my personal life about my hobby, and up until a few months ago, nobody outside of my close family and two dear friends of mine knew I was a book blogger. Why? Because I've always seen it as something that I like doing, but not something that is super impressive. This year, however, in some strange twist of fate, I said it out loud: "I'm a blogger". The people I told were actually impressed, which surprised me, really. Even better was the fact that people were genuinely interested in what I did as a blogger. So the fun questions started, and I thought it would be cool if I'd answer a few of them here as well.

• Why did you start blogging?

I have addressed this a few times, but ICYMI, I started blogging because I love talking about books. The story behind that answer is one I don't usually mention, but the general idea is that at the time I started my blog I had moved to a different country and I needed something to keep me occupied while I was learning the language and getting used to the changes of a new country, new culture, new people. Blogging was something that I was introduced to in high school through a friend of mine that worked with me at the school newspaper. Blogging was something fresh at the time, very few people did it, and it was mostly seen as an online diary. I remember seeing the first book blogs I saw at the time - we're talking 2008-2009 here - and thinking how cool could it be to have a blog of my own dedicated to books. I was also kind of familiar with book blogging, because I used to have a blog about books and soundtracks that I've closed before I started Ruby's Books.

• Why do you blog in English?

The only books I read at the time I started my blog were in English. There were very few translated books that I was interested in, since the paranormal genre was still a bit fresh in Romania at the time, and I didn't really like the way the translations were done (sorry) so I decided to read the books in the original language. This made me think. Instead of writing reviews in Romanian, which would have been fine and damned easy, why not challenge myself and do it all in English? So basically my blog also became a sort of free intensive language school.

• What do you get out of blogging?

Aside from a way to learn a language pretty well (if I do say so myself), I get to meet new authors and book lovers. That is a wonderful perk of this hobby. I also have the amazing opportunity to sometimes receive free books in exchange for reviews. Most of these books are books I probably wouldn’t have read before, because chances are I wouldn’t have heard of them before. That in itself is awesome, right?

But there's also great stuff I've learned that I probably wouldn't have known how to do otherwise: html language, social media (and I'm not talking about using the various available platforms to put my life on display for everyone to see), text formatting, and many, many other technical skills that I never even dreamed about having.

I get to do something that I love. I do it for free, because I love talking about books. 

***

Another thing that changed is that I found a great community of bloggers that are based outside of the US. I talked about this a few times in the past, so I won’t go into great detail now, but just know that I owe those amazing bloggers a lot. I managed to socialize more, which if you knew real-life me, you’d know it’s not something insanely easy for me to do.

***

A few stats: 

• Total Blog Posts: 956
• Total Page Views: 123,128 Thank you so much!
• Most Popular Book Review: Three Meters Above The Sky by Federico Moccia 
• Most Popular Post: Blog Tour Book Review & Guest Post: Identity Break by Stifyn Emrys

Things I'm excited about:

• I am having some ideas about discussion posts coming up that I’m going to write about. 
• There are some great books I’ve read that I’ll talk about in the future, as well as some new playlists to share. I know I’ve said this about the latter, but I really have been creating playlists for books.
• Connecting my Instagram account with my blog. I've been pretty bad at this for some reason (I can't really explain the why of it, because there really isn't one), and I want to change that in the future. 

***

At the end of the day, these past 8 years have been amazing and I will always be greatful to that young 22 year old who decided to try her hand out at book blogging. Thank you to everyone who has been a part of my journey. Thank you to the amazing authors who write amazing stories, thank you to the publishers who work with international bloggers like myself, thank you to publishers in general, thank you to self published authors, thank you to every book lover - bloggers and non-bloggers - that share this great passion with me.

Thank you for being here with me these last 8 years. And to many, many more years to come!