Why Do I Still Run a Book Blog?

Words Like Silver turns 15 today, and I’ve been overthinking what exactly I want from the anniversary, as I’ve also been wondering what I want from the titles JOURNALIST and AUTHOR overall.

I’ve had a hard time with the scraping down of everything into “content” and how that makes me feel about what I produce. I want WLS and my work to be successful, but have been a tad miserable in how soulless a focus on self-promotion feels. I've been practicing, so to speak, with promoting WLS before I dial in on doing the same for my debut novel.

I owe my work the opportunity to be discovered, but I do think frequently about the point at which that makes my book blog…different. Or shifts what it's best at.

For context, I came up in the heyday of blogging. I started my book blog at age 13, at 2011–too young to take advantage of the leverage, but around for long enough by now to be grateful for the stamina and the macro-view of book publishing over time, no matter which role I’ve occupied in the ecosystem: bookseller, reviewer, journalist, book club moderator, author, etc. I'll be here forever.

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I sometimes think about how much better of a growth position I’d be in if I hadn’t let my old Twitter account expire after a 30-day break (oops), or had transferred over my old (massive) email list when I was eighteen or so and left Wordpress for Squarespace, or had kept up with the broader industry as consistently during college when most of the contacts I knew left or shuffled. But I experienced college fully and took a step back from the publishing ecosystem, which was good for me. I just became less central or remembered—not that I was ever the most desired book blogger anyway. Still, a nice little what if.

I remember some bloggers shifting over to BookTube, or the first wave of a particular expressive kind of creator ushering in video book content with bold reaction thumbnails. Should WLS have constantly shifted with each medium? Would I have a bigger following and therefore many more opportunities that would keep the balance of all this work now from being quite as hard to maintain? But I still call myself a book blogger because the BLOG part is the key.

The question of this year has been: why run a book blog? Why blog? Why do I not consider Substack to be a blog in the same way I consider—say, an RSS feed targeting SEO? (In this reflection, you’ll notice some career bleed and resume language, as that’s been my focus for the last few weeks. Scrolling LinkedIn this week, every other listing I see is about AI, or possibly using AI, which also has me thinking about what is safe or solid or worth building.)

Isn’t all content just totally empty by now? Why would written (digital) text—that doesn’t grip an algorithm or attention economy—matter to me if we’ve decided we don’t value it anyway? If we only do in small, palatable doses packaged for social media or pre-existing publications?

Obviously, I love the books part, and the literature. This year, I’m thinking more so about the blogging aspect of my book blog.

As the emphasis has shifted towards individual platform-building within my career, I’ve seen fantastic traction on text-forward engines like Substack as well as challenged myself to stretch creatively in domains like video and audio—each for the purpose of the discoverability that will help me write and create. I still loathe/resent/curse having to post my face online even in small doses, but have learned I love sharing “voice notes.”

What I’ve figured out in the last months of doing this is that stuffing WLS into the confines of another platform usually just means I’m trading the financial pressure of time/invisibility for the algorithmic pressure of warp.

Obviously, I would like to have enough time and stability to write the way that I do, but I’m not sure the latter is much more rewarding. Thinking about social growth is actually pretty miserable, and I don’t enjoy the flattening of parasocial relationships or wasting time scrolling or the weariness of seeing formula rewarded more than originality (not even speaking of myself here. There is a reason a constant reading thread on WLS is that of digital minimalism; I’m not meant to have 8-hour screentime and a hot take.

It’s given me a bit of an identity crisis this year, to be honest, because making my dream job work involves a different set of day-to-day responsibilities (for now) than the ones I actually want. I’m having a harder time than I expected with the influencer-ification of my chosen workload (which has nothing to do with seeing the work with dignity or anything—I have several influencer friends I adore.)

Something about the short-form packaging of my own blog and self just feels grosser and darker than I thought in practice. WLS is too close to me to fully commodify in that way, and I probably value a sense of honest cohesion (online/offline selves) too much to properly bifurcate a WLS “persona,” even as I acknowledge that the version of myself that curates WLS is only one specific part of my personality. (Reminder to self: link that whole essay because I’ve written about it extensively before.)

While I’d still like more people to stumble upon Words Like Silver and choose to support my work for its value, whether that’s here, for a magazine, or through my books—I do fundamentally think that there is a gigantic difference between the organic nature of a blog versus any sort of content pumped out onto any sort of feed. I say it often because it’s true, but I want to grow WLS so that I can then work on it more and give more to it without the time and cost and efforts eating away at me so much. I can’t quite keep myself from writing so much, but I’d be very happy if it wouldn’t be so expensive or isolated or exhausting to run everything alone and also try to be a person in tandem. Right now I’m in a place where everything I do bleeds into everything else, so success in one area would lift everything else.

I’m not under any illusions that my book blog is ground-breaking journalism but I’m very proud of what it’s done and the impact that it’s had, from turning “non-readers” into readers to getting whole school systems to shift their bulk purchases from Amazon to local booksellers. Or even just getting people to trace weird reading associations or dissect the funky prose on page 128 of some backlist ‘13 speculative title I can’t stop talking about.

Part of why so many (!!!) readers love and appreciate Words Like Silver—and part of why I’ve maintained its longevity for 15 years—is that I am uninfluenced by the popular books peppering the algorithm and I’m not packaging my content to appeal to a finicky formula rewarding certain proportions that chip away at me if I think about them for too long (face on camera, “hooks,” etc.)

There’s a middle ground here, one that I’m still struggling to find. I could do a better job at both, and I also think often about how the middle ground of anything—the gap of intention vs. execution—often turns us into hypocrites.

Format a hundred blog reviews? Format an existing review for every weekday?

Schedule “ICYMI” blog call-backs and just not ever check my feeds?

Actually stick to blog pillars and pick my four most dominant niches?

Turn everything into a digestible book list graphic that could rack up another 100 subscribers?

Write each hed to be clicky like I would for a journalism assignment?

(All of this is branding work I can easily do for anyone else, but struggle to apply to the dimensionality of my own outlet. I like to let Words Like Silver be whatever it is. The thing is that I know how I could spike and multiply WLS’s footprint, and maybe it’s a betrayal not to be doing those things and proving I mean that. But it just feels wrong for this specific project, as it requires being much more closed off and stifled, I think, than the associative nature of my reading/thinking/experimenting deserves. Sure, I could schedule out a content calendar for the next month, but WLS is just…organic. I’ll post an old review because a related topic came up that day.)

But: in the last 15 years of book blogging, I remain profoundly grateful for the format of my website above all else. I’ve mentioned this elsewhere—on the other feeds—but I’m big on form feeding function.

In the case of WLS, I don’t know who reads these articles unless you tell me. I almost never check my blog stats. When I post elsewhere, I feel drained; when I post on my own website, I feel invigorated, anonymous, relaxed, free. (I did invest in a custom design in 2024, which was the most money I’ve ever spent on anything professionally. And it is gorgeous, and I’m obsessed, and the ability to add in certain details or expressions changed the way I write and create for the better.)

It is the most “me”-like area of the Internet because I’m not scraping myself down unintentionally in any way, and I do think anyone posting to anything algorithmic might feel vaguely like they’re approaching the same feeling in certain connected lanes and spaces—but it’s not the same as having your own.

Realistically, I’ve made some wonderful connections elsewhere on the Internet lately that will be helpful to my debut novel, my journalism, and my next year or two of career trajectory (as well as in general, sharing the love of books!) But I’ve definitely felt that being online in those spaces claws into me in a way that throws me off-balance, so the 15-year anniversary of Words Like Silver is a lovely reminder of why this blog exists as a blog and not as a series of carousels. I don’t schedule out posts; I don’t edit them too much unless I’m being picky in the aftermath. 90% of the time, I don’t plan out what I say, unless that means me going back to an eager notes-app entry from my brain whirling before dinner.

I do like lists on occasion, usually half-finished in a notebook, but I also hate that I’m super aware that 1) lists are one of the easiest ways to grow and 2) many people also hate lists because they’re so sick of seeing them because they’re such an easy way to grow. (Also, use odd numbers. Brains like them better.) I know all these tricks from working in social media or for magazines, but now I’m in the weird spot of always analyzing whether I’m applying them naturally to my own blog, whether I should do them intentionally, or whether I’m consciously screwing myself over by not deploying every attention trick I have in my arsenal.

Since I’ve been looking ahead to what the writing career demands lately, that’s looked a lot like creating content—which I don’t like, so I want to make sure I’m going to my CMS to post directly on Words Like Silver instead of defaulting to drafting within another platform. The blog still needs to be focused on the blog, and this year I’ve drifted from that slightly more as I’ve experimented with growth in other areas.

Although there is (much) overlap, I do think part of why my WLS posts have seen such traction and success on other platforms is because they’re developed without the pressures or taint of anything else. When I write anything for WLS, it is singular and does not have an audience in mind. In terms of publishing on the Internet, my writing is as pure as you could possibly get there, and that feels practically impossible in this day and age.

I think that purity of a blog is what a lot of people on other platforms want, but they can’t ever get there because the platform itself is too muddy for it. Certain ones are better than others for sure, but an actual blog is the good stuff. You just won’t necessarily see numbers or reactions or a community grip on something you wrote. (Maybe some prefer the diffusion to the work itself? That rush you feel after you hit “post” can feel so good, but it’s still different—not better or worse—on a blog.)

It can be harder, within my career demands, to prioritize an outlet like WLS—which really doesn’t pay me or feed me and is harder to find within a search engine. I constantly feel the dopaminergic pull that if I could just grow or care more or pour into one platform—ideally for some prescribed amount of time—then I wouldn’t experience the woes I deal with on a daily basis as a full-time, self-employed writer and author. In recent years, platform and follower count have unlocked the opportunity and stability that I crave for my next steps, just enough to keep me wanting and close, but the pursuit of those aspects does undermine the sheer singularity that makes a book blog special in this day and age. There’s a balance in deciding what’s necessary adaptation vs. a corruption of identity.

This year, I’ve learned a lot about what I’m stubbornly “behind the times” on and could stand to improve vs. what I absolutely should maintain my grit on. I’ve realized a lot of the value in maintaining Words Like Silver’s “sense of self” when I know a few tweaks could give me some instant validation at major cost to its identity. I have to believe in the preciousness of that. Does that sound self-important to say? Maybe. I love what I’ve built and how it’s stayed the course no matter what, even as I’ve changed or the style has developed or my frequency ebbs and flows.

Even now, I’m registering how I’ve trained myself in these last few months to unintentionally notice who will read and click on my article elsewhere, and end up subtly writing with them more in mind. In a pure “blog” post, I don’t have that problem—even knowing the WLS readers who check it all the time. It’s less immediate, and that invincibility (i.e. reduction in perfectionism, a willingness to let it be more ephemeral, etc.) actually has the opposite effect of making everything I post on my book blog feel more real, tangible, and important. Permanent!

Maybe six people will click on my book review of Midnight at the Electric by Jodi Lynn Anderson. When I do check my stats, maybe once every sixth month, it does sometimes make me sad if a piece I threw everything I had into for hours didn’t get more than a glance. But I’m still glad I did it that way, and forcing myself to regurgitate keywords or content gaps doesn’t feel natural to what this is. Just now, I wondered if I should use text hierarchy or bundle my thoughts to make this more pleasing on another platform, but that was yet again some journalism/strategy kicking in.

As I format this to post on a different platform, I think about how maybe this could pop off and then I’d be kicking myself for not adding helpful CTAs to favorite articles or my upcoming book information or my other social channels I’ve started working on or. But this isn’t even my 15 years nostalgia, just an expression of gratitude for having a literal .com address that would still be kicking if everything else went down.

This is a notes app post, and nobody desperately needs me to embed images between my late bedtime and around 8:30 a.m. when I settle in to get some work done while my twin sister’s in class. (I’m visiting her at HBS and will take any opportunity to brag about her.) I hold WLS to a different standard than my more professional, turned-in work, and that also gives me the freedom and looseness that lets it thrive.

When I hit a decade, I said I couldn’t see myself putting down WLS, and that’s still the case. The antidote to exhaustion and monotony and platform fatigue and the weariness is…still a book blog, even if my intention ripples out into the other platforms. My book blog can be sloppy and passionate and occasionally invisible, but it will endure. It is so ingrained in me. I’ve mentioned it before, but everyone on the first night of college was like: “Oh, you’re that book girl.” It is wls / grace.

Again, I’m still learning how best to separate out the feeling of “running my book blog” versus “cross-posting for visibility” but I do think the answer is to always view the latter as something secondary. Words Like Silver is the main thing, and that’s why it’s continued for so long.

More soon. Viva la blog!!!!

Xo,

Grace