Time Management Tuesday: The Struggle For Blogging Time, Or, Another Blog Bites The Dust

Last week it came to my attention that after sixteen years Julie Danielson is calling it a day with her well-known and highly-regarded childlit blog 7 Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Who is left of the group I knew from before 2010? Ms Yingling Reads, for one. Author Tanita Davis was blogging at Finding Wonderland from 2005 and is presently posting at her own blog {fiction, instead of lies}. Anybody else? Anybody?

In her farewell post, Jules says some things that help explain why litblogging's moment has passed.

•  "It has truly been a struggle lately to find the time." "There are other things I'd like to get back to doing, new things I want to try, and people I want to spend more time with." 
•  "...most people stopped leaving comments at blogs and started leaving comments about blog posts at social media sites where posts are shared (this is a thing now)"

Time

Blogging is time consuming, and 7 Imps must have been particularly time consuming, because Jules did extensive reviews (I do what I call "reader responses," which means whatever I want it to mean, and I often mean "short.") and interviews. It can be hard to justify that time, especially if you need to generate income with some kind of work, writing or not, and your blog brings nothing in. Even writers who blog rarely make money directly from the blog. Theoretically, readers will be so taken with our blog posts that they will go out and buy one of our books, and we'll get our cut of that somewhere down the road. Note that I said, "theoretically." 

If your blog leads to blog-related involvement like, in my case, covering local author appearances or, in Jules' case, attending the Bologna Book Fair and a great many other things, that's more time.

We all have to accept the 24-hour-in-a-day limitation. 

Engagement

As Jules also said, people have stopped leaving comments or, probably, visiting and reading posts at all. I know I am very limited in what I read at blogs, because of time and because so many of the blogs I used to interact with are gone. Who would I read? But just as it's hard to continue blogging for free, it's hard to continue blogging without engagement. 

Money and engagement are similar things. Feedback. Feedback is what justifies use of time.

Julie Danielson used her time well with 7 Impossible Things Before Breakfast, and I'm sure she'll continue to use it well with all the freelance writing work she does.

Let's Finish By Making This All About Gail

In 2008, the year my last book was published, Jules interviewed me for 7 Imps. I had not seen the post in years. She made me sound great. You can definitely get a feel for how much work and time she put into that blog. I'd like to send a link to this thing to every agent and editor I contact and have it posted in my obituary.