Discussion: Blogger Burnout

Hey all, Dani here.

I feel like I need to apologize for not having a post up the past couple of days. The past couple of weeks it has been a teensy bit of a struggle to get my posts written and scheduled on time, and I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to not miss a day of blogging.

Looking at my blogging notebook, I currently have 16 book reviews that need to be written, 22 manga reviews, and three NetGalley reviews for the month of May (obviously I have roughly 20 backlisted NetGalley reviews, and some for June through October of 2019 as well).

And I was doing so well at having a post up pretty much every single day. I missed a few weekends when we were busy with packing and moving, but aside from that, my posts have been really regular.

Of course, I knew it wouldn’t last. Being able to keep up that sort of consistency in both post amount and post quality is pretty unrealistic. So that ended up hitting me full force when Damian and I were making plans for Friday and I realized that I didn’t have a post ready. We were getting ready to run around town and go to the movies, so I didn’t have time to even prep up a post, let alone fully write one. So…I just didn’t post one.

Then yesterday happened, and while I had time in the morning, I ended up catching up on the last couple weeks worth of BookTube videos instead. Then we had errands to run, and then my brother offered to buy us all tickets to a baseball game if Damian and I picked our mom up and drove her to the stadium. I don’t get to see my mom and brother a whole lot, so we spent our evening in Columbus last night. And once again, I didn’t have a post ready, so I didn’t have anything go up.

I want to keep posting. I want to catch up on all of these reads and reviews I’ve neglected. But I’m also feeling like I want to do something different, or new. I need to vary my content a little bit more so that it doesn’t feel like I’m a review factory or something. I know common advice to avoid burnout is that it’s okay to take a break, but I don’t want to go on a hiatus or anything. I enjoy being active on my blog.

I’ve been thinking of bringing back my recommendations series of posts. I was doing them weekly back in 2017 through the beginning of 2018. But if I did them weekly then I think I would face the same issue as last time and run out of recommendation topics. However, I’ve also thought about trying to do some discussion posts. I’ve seen other book bloggers have these really awesome discussion posts, and I’ve been thinking about maybe starting up that series for a while.

This leads me to think that maybe I could do an every other week situation. So if I decided to run these on Fridays, for example, one Friday it would be a recommendation post, and then the next Friday would be a discussion, and the Friday after that would be a recommendation again. That way I could have a little more variety in my content.

I also really need to get back into the swing of doing book tags. I think I have four in my 2019 blogging notebook that I need to do, so I might try and add tags into my blog schedule one day of the week.

Does that sound like a decent idea for someone struggling with a little bit of blogger burnout? Especially seeing as how I don’t want to take a break from the blog?

I know that I’ve been running this blog since January of 2016 and so it sometimes seems like I’ve got it all together and I know what I’m doing, but basically I think we all have times where we feel lost and a bit clueless.

Right now I’m thinking my blog schedule looks like this

Monday: Manga Review

(or Calendar Girls on the first Monday of the month)

Tuesday: Book Review

Wednesday: Weekly Wrap-Up

Thursday: Book Review

Friday: Recommendation/Discussion

Saturday: Book Review

Sunday: Book Tag

There’s still a lot of reviewing going on there, so maybe there will be bonus tag posts or something occasionally on Tues/Thurs/Sat, but that still seems like a better schedule overall.

If you have any other advice to fight off this blogger burnout, let me know in the comments. Also, if you have any suggestions for discussion topics, I will gladly accept them.

All right, I think that’s about all for today. Thanks for the advice and the understanding, and I’ll be back soon with more bookish content.