This week marks 5 years since the start of Let’s Talk Bookish. In celebration of this, I’ll be diving into the rich archives of this meme from Monday to Friday and choose several old topics to either discuss for the first time or revisit. Today I go back to March 25, 2022 where we discussed the evolution of book blogging. This topic is suggested by the founder of this meme, Rukky @ Eternity Books. This was right before this meme got transferred to our current host, so there’s no blogpost on this topic. I didn’t do it myself as I didn’t have this English blog back then and I was very busy moving houses.

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books starting in August 2019, and was then cohosted by Dani @ Literary Lion from May 2020 to March 2022. Since April 2022, the meme moved to another host, Aria @ Book Nook Bits. Let’s Talk Bookish is a meme where participants discuss certain topics, share their opinions, and share their love by visiting each other’s posts.

Prompts: How long have you been blogging, and how has the book blogging community changed since you started? Do you think it’s been a positive or negative change? What do you think the future of blogging will be? Would you want to keep blogging even if blogging becomes very “old school” and isn’t really done anymore?

How long have you been blogging, and how has the book blogging community changed since you started?

I have been blogging on and off since 2017. I have deleted several blogs but always came back again. I did it all. Solely Dutch, solely English and a bilingual blog. I wouldn’t recommend the latter form, because it was very chaotic. It was a mess to say the least. Since 2022 I have seperate blogs for Dutch and English and this works fine. I think I have been rather consistent. I barely blogged on this one at first, but became much more consistent in 2023 I think. I’ve seen the book blogging community change a lot though. Many bloggers from back then (and especially diverse voices) have quit blogging and we barely see newcomers around. Many people switched to short form content such as Instagram and TikTok. I think the book community has been scattered all over the place as many people leave Twitter as well. Half of the blogging world is on Bluesky, the other half on Threads. Bluesky is too slow for me honestly. Furthermore, I barely see popular books being reviewed on blogs anymore and this is totally different from what it used to be. Therefore, I’m enjoying bloghopping less, like I discussed yesterday. As a reader of fairly popular books myself, I want to know what others think of them. And I’m not one for TikTok LOL. Instagram is fine, but demotivating because the reach is so low since the start of this year. So, what I want to say is that the book blog community is slowly decreasing.

Do you think it’s been a positive or negative change?

I think it’s quite a negative change as the bloggers who are still going strong have less reach as well and many people who want to read ARCs barely get approved by publishers if they aren’t on the short form content platforms such as Instagram or TikTok. So, there are less in-depth reviews of books, just promotional stuff with someone holding a book for a really short amount of time. Therefore it’s easy to get “shallow” books hyped and many hidden gems stay hidden. Short reviews can feel very shallow too.

What do you think the future of blogging will be?

I think there will still be book bloggers around, but they’re probably no Gen Z or millenials. So book blogging and the books promoted on these blogs become more and more niche. I’m afraid that children’s literature or YA won’t be represented on blogs anymore and that these books only get quite shallow promotion. Because let’s face it, all popular media these days are super shallow. Or do I sound like a millenial now? LOL.

Would you want to keep blogging even if blogging becomes very “old school” and isn’t really done anymore?

Oh trust me, I’ve hit this point before. Often. Especially with my Dutch blog. However, I will keep doing it for now, even though I see many people don’t want to read long reviews anymore because of the shorter attention span. I also discussed this in yesterday’s post about bloghopping. I’m not sure what the future holds, so let’s see where things will go. I think the blogging world already changed a lot compared to when this topic was chosen in March 2022, BookTok became increasingly popular shortly after.

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Do you notice a change in the book blogging community since you’ve started your blog? What do you think about this change? Does it affect your enjoyment and desire to blog?