New Year, New Blog Goals: Welcome to 2020


Happy late 2020! I meant to make this post a long time ago, but it's taken me a minute to decide exactly what I want to say with this. For most of the blog's history, I've kept a pretty consistent formatting, generally posting Wednesdays and Sundays and sometimes Fridays with YA reviews, discussion posts, and interviews. As I head into the third year of having the blog, I want to adjust this system a bit to better suit where I'm at with my blogging and reading and where your interests are now. Because, most of all, I maintain the blog for you, and I want to make content that you find most exciting.
As I headed into restricting my posting for the blog, I wanted to make sure everyone was involved in the changes so I created tons of polls and questions on both Twitter and Instagram. Those survey results have helped shape my decisions about the blog going forward.
The first change that you may or may not notice is that I'm no longer going to stick to a defined posting schedule. It's sorta been like that for the month of December on here as I was trying to make up my mind about the blog's future, but I'm officially not going to promise any posts on specific days. I understand the value of having a consistent posting schedule, and it worked really well for me for a long time, but it no longer suits how I want to blog. I realized that I had a ton of reviews and discussions in my drafts I just no longer felt like posting because I'd written them months ago and they got lost in the shuffle. I want to post reviews when I'm still passionate about the book and excited to talk about it. The same goes for the topics in my discussion posts.
This doesn't mean that I'll disappear for a whole week like I have in the past. I'll be posting at least once, but hopefully twice, a week. In the polls, everyone was most excited about the opinion posts, so I'm going to focus on creating those as well as my reviews. I'll also include the occasional interview because I personally really enjoy doing those, and it's a great way to support and spotlight debut authors. On the subject of reviews, I was thrilled to see that you were open to me posting reviews about books outside of YA. I have uploaded a few in the past, but I was always scared that you weren't interested in those. It makes me so happy that I can continue sharing about all the books that I've enjoyed, even if it's not necessarily YA. Though, if you're a YA fan, don't worry because there will still be tons of YA content here because that was the first category I really fell in love with, and it will always have a huge chunk of my heart.
As far as other kinds of posts, I was happy to see that most of you were interested in content that went outside the realm of directly books. I've been thinking about creating some content around my experience getting into college and with high school to give advice to others who are going through it. I know I felt so lost during that process, and it can be helpful to hear from someone who has been through it. I'm not exactly sure what that will look like yet, but it's been something I've been passionate about, and it fits with my goals of helping fellow teens connect with the information they need. If you're a teen who has any questions about school stuff or general application things or how to do that kind of research, feel free to email readingwritingandme@gmail.com and I'll bee happy to offer you anything I know to help because it's incredibly confusing, and I owe a lot to the nice people and internet friends who helped me along the way.
Another, not necessarily change, but addition to the blog is that I'm going to make a real effort to be more active on bookstagram! I've been really MIA lately there in particular, and I feel bad about it. With even people on Twitter voting for more content there, I'm definitely taking note. In addition to regular posts, I want to play with the stories feature more to talk about what I'm reading at the moment, hear from you about what you're reading, offer book suggestions and get some from all of you. I also might go live sometimes to discuss certain books or give a tour of my newly reorganized shelves. I think that could be tons of fun, and it'll be a great way to stay connected even when I don't have as much time to write long posts.
In that same vein, I threw out a random question about potentially starting a YouTube channel, and it was actually the most enthusiastic response I got to any question. While I still don't totally feel comfortable on camera and I think I'll mostly stick to Instagram for the next couple months, it's definitely a 2020 goal of mine to start planning out some content and educating myself on that. It would be so much fun to have a place to have discussions that don't require so much typing and give all of you a glimpse at what I'm doing, especially as I get ready to go to college and start experiencing so many changes. I'm still not sure what that will look like, but keep an eye out closer to summer, and I'll keep you updated. Thank you so much for all your continued support as I try out new platforms and make different kinds of content.
Another topic that came up in the survey had to do with some of my other projects, and part of the reason I've had to scale back on the blogging. In the last 6 months, I've launched a podcast called The Empathy Factor and a music blog, Music, Musings, and Me, as a companion with it. A lot of you hadn't heard about these other projects but were interested in learning more, so I wanted to take a moment to talk about them on here. On the podcast, I talk about all the music news, new album and single reviews, and my favorite artist. I also do discussions of books that I read about musicians and discuss their music. That series, which will be a companion with a review post on here, will launch later this month. On the music blog, I make themed playlists, write about my concert experiences (which I previously posted on here) and write a weekly post about new songs I've discovered over the last few days. A lot of the times, the posts correlate with discussions on the podcast. I hope you'll go check those out if they sound interesting to you. Both are linked to their respective websites so that you can easily find the best platform for you to listen to the platform on. I'm also going to start sharing that content on Twitter and Instagram stories so that you can keep up with what's going on there since they don't have their own social media sites.
Over the next few weeks, I'm going to discuss and announce a couple other additional fun things as I figure out the details, but I'm so excited about this next phase of the blog. Feel free to leave comments and suggestions here or email them in. Like I said earlier, I want to make the content that is most fun for you, and I'm glad that I got to do the surveys to give me a better idea. I think that these new little changes will help me stay motivated and provide you with the best content possible.

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