When I originally started this blog, I wanted to spin off my book reviews and reading life from my primary blog, One Thousand and One Parsecs. That blog was originally about my writing, and it still is, but I also post other random things there too, and thoughts on a variety of other subjects… and honestly, I don’t know what I post there anymore, which probably isn’t a good sign. I’ve been struggling for the last few years to know exactly what I should post there, but the audience fell off a long time ago, given how social media has replaced blogging generally, but since I made the conscious decision not to do other social media, my blog has more or less been my online home… except, not really. It’s complicated.
In any case, I launched this blog during the pandemic, and was originally really excited about it, but when I saw all the outrage and toxicity that was circulating in the social media world at the time, I did an about-face and made all of my previous posts private. I still kept up the book pages, since I use those for my newsletter when I share book recommendations, but I killed the blog itself. My thinking at the time was that since this is how I make my living (writing books), I shouldn’t be doing things that might make me a target for outrage mobs in the reading space, or that might turn off potential readers for my own books. In other words, I didn’t want a reader to enjoy one of my books, only to read some of my opinions about her favorite book and realize that I didn’t like it. Something like that.
But recently, I came to a realization on one of my early morning walks that made me think that it might be good to bring back the book blog and turn it into a thing. That realization was that the era of mass culture is coming to an end, where everyone in our society reads / watches / consumes the same things, at least to the degree where we’re all familiar with it. Instead, we are entering a world of the thousand true fans paradigm, where the content is exploding and the culture is fragmented a thousand different ways, into tiny niche communities that the wider society is generally totally oblivious to. It’s been going that way for a long time, but I think we’re reaching a critical mass where this new cultural paradigm is going to replace the paradigm of a mass culture.
In this new world of cultural fragmentation, one of the best ways to provide value is to become a voice that people in your tiny subcommunity can trust to help connect them with content that they will genuinely enjoy. Creating great content to put out into the world is a fine and good thing, but what’s even better is to create good content AND connect the people who find that content to other great content like yours. In a world where everyone is overwhelmed with all of the available reading options, sharing your recommendations for where to find their next read can be a really great thing. It can also be a good and useful way to differentiate yourself from other writers / creators, since even if a reader doesn’t agree with all of your recommendations, the fact that they understand your tastes a little better helps them to figure out what they like about your own work. For example, I haven’t read all of Larry Correia’s books just because urban fantasy isn’t my cup of tea, but based on the stuff he shares on his blog, I’ve got a very good idea of the kind of stuff he writes and whether I’ll be interested in reading it.
To put it simply, I’ve come to realize that this blog, if done right, may provide as much or more value to my readers than simply writing the next book and putting it out into the world. Of course, “if done right” is the key qualifier, since the internet is already brimming with toxicity and I don’t want to add any more to any of that. So moving forward, when I do dedicate a post to my thoughts about / review of a book, I will generally only do that if I think it’s a book worth reading. I may make an exception if it’s a big-name author or a very popular book, but I’m going to be very careful not to punch down or to spread too much negativity or outrage content.
Beyond that, I’m not sure what I’ll do, but I have some ideas and will experiment with a few things until I find what I like. Maybe a monthly recap of all the stuff I’ve read, patterned after how Howard Tayler used to do his movie reviews (with the threshold of awesome and the threshold of suck—I read enough books these days that I could probably do a monthly post like that). Or maybe some other content. I don’t know, but I’m certainly open to ideas. What sort of stuff do you want to see?