Finished a great book yesterday: Fortress Beta City by my friend JR Handley. It is now on my “to review” list, which makes it the twentieth book on that list. Yes, that is a problem.
See, I originally started this blog as a way to put up MyBookTable pages for books that I wanted to recommend to my author newsletter subscribers. I needed a separate blog in order to keep my own books (as in, books that I wrote) from the books that I recommend. Separate blogs, separate libraries.
But then I decided to also use the blog as a backup for my Goodreads reviews, after losing one too many reviews due to Goodreads shenanigans and a poor user interface. And so long as I’m cross-posting reviews, I might as well include a MyBookTable page in order to earn some affiliate income from it, right?
Trouble is, the only time that I allow myself to work on this blog is at night, after the baby is asleep. And putting a nine-month old to sleep can be exhausting. Also, if my other work isn’t done by then, it tends to bleed over. And then there’s time to decompress, maybe watch some YouTube, etc.
All of these problems can be solved with a better daily routine, which I’m perpetually currently working on. For now, that means getting into the habit of blogging daily, even if some of these posts are just filler until I can turn my mental focus away from establishing the habit and toward writing better quality posts—like actual reviews.
Eventually, I would like to not only share reviews on this site, but on the email list that I’m putting together to accompany this site. Every time I read a book that I’d like to recommend, I’ll write up a quick newsletter with the review, links to the MyBookTable pages (and affiliate links), and a list of recent blog posts that newsletter subscribers may find interesting. In this way, the newsletter will augment the blog, in a similar way to how social media augments blogs. Except the newsletter is a platform that I own, and social media ultimately ended up replacing blogs, not just augmenting them.
So that’s the plan, if it makes sense. Book blog –> book reviews –> book links –> 1001 parsecs books newsletter. Now I’m going to bed.