Let's Talk Bookish; The Evolution of Book Blogging

It's Friday and time for another Let's Talk Bookish post, courtesy of Literary Lion and Eternity Books. The theme of the week was the evolution of book blogging and here's the questions related to the prompt.

How long have you been blogging, and how has the book blogging community changed since you started? Do you think it’s been a positive or negative change? What do you think the future of blogging will be? Would you want to keep blogging even if blogging becomes very “old school” and isn’t really done anymore?

I've been book blogging since July 2012, so I've been doing it for almost ten years and things have certainly changed a bit during that time period. Now, there's Bookstagram, BookTok and BookTube, in addition to the "regular" book blogging and I think it has both positive and negative sides.

The negative sides are that there's a "competition" in a sense between the more visual (Bookstagram etc) versus the written ("regular" book blogs), as well as the feeling that fewer people actually bother to read book blogs, but rather get inspiration and book recs from Bookstagram and such. Also, if one combines regular book blogging with Bookstagram or one of the others, there's more work to do in order to keep up as it can be a bit time consuming.

A more positive side of the newer mediums is that one can reach out to more people in a different and more visual way than before. As more people are using Instagram and TikTok, one can get a bigger reach if done correctly, over writing a regular book blog.

I'm honestly nore sure what the future of blogging will be, but after ten years of doing it, I must say that there are days when I'm totally fed up and feeling that I put more work into it than what I gain from it. I may quit or put the blog on a break sooner or later, but I haven't quite decided yet.