Book Blogger Confessions (2)

This is a shiny, new blogger meme co-hosted by Tiger from Tiger's All Consuming Books and Karen at For What It's Worth Reviews. It's time to open up and share (and vent) about our blogging experiences!

The question is:

January 16th: Have you ever had reading/blogging slumps? How do you work through them or work around them?

I think the biggest slump I had came after I had been blogging for about 2 months. I started in Feb. of 2011 and by April I was getting frustrated, and it clearly shows in my lack of posting. Go click the archive button and you can see the two months where I didn't break 12 posts together.

I really went into blogging thinking, "I got this. This will be fun and easy and publishers will all want to work with me!"

Then reality hit. Yes, blogging is fun, but it's also work. It takes effort to write reviews, read books, send emails, send follow up emails, participate in memes, host giveaways, connect with other bloggers ... It's freakin' exhausting! Add all of that on top of a full-time job, a semblance of a social life, and writing a novel and it's no wonder I got burnt out.

Then this magical thing happened. I found out about this:

BookExpo America. In the beginning of June, all I heard about was BEA. Who went, what they got, who they met ... It was insane and I was insanely jealous. I had no idea there was this incredible book mecca just waiting for me. I made the decision that month to go.

It's strange; the more excited I got about BEA, the more fun my blog became. June is when you can see a noticable turnaround in my blog. The posts got more detailed, the frequency of my posting increased and because of that my stats went up. My follower counts on my blog, Twitter, and Goodreads all went up. My unique visitors number started increasing.

Now BEA is a few months (!!!!) away, and I'm on track to go. I've also made connections with several publicists from different publishing houses, and I can barely keep track of the books I get for review. I just hit my 1,100 follower mark today (*snoopy dance*), and I have become good friends with several bloggers. Blogging life is good.