Blogging: The Emotional Ride

For a minute I had to recheck whether to use ‘roller-coaster’ instead of emotional. I elected the latter since despite the highs and lo’s of blogging, the overall activity treats a dedicated blogger well.

January 2009, OEBooks' birthdate, I came across a blog post that has stayed with me over the years. I was transfixed by this blogger listing what new bloggers could expect. First he promised excitement, followed by a few months of more excitement chasing down friends, getting ‘liked’, joining discussions and otherwise playing the social media game.

Once the excitement waned, the expectations would drop in. This time would be marked by looking over our shoulders at what other bloggers were doing to measure what we were doing, either right or wrong.

Don’t fall for this, the blogger warned us. If you're serious about why you started blogging, you'll push by this phase of feeling fatigued because you think no one is reading your blog. He even personalized this phase describing what he went through... before he started realizing his effort wasn't in vain.

All 6+ years I've been blogging I've never forgotten that blogger's advice. Initially OEBooks' comment box was closed. Based on my mentoring blogger's advice, I thought inviting comments would detract from my mission, which was to attract ‘readers’. I can’t believe, or rather I can believe...another reason I kept the box closed, but I actually asked readers not to comment. I think I said it nicely though, something to the tune of ‘please don’t get me worked up with comments...’ except, several people contacted me and convinced me to do otherwise. To this day I keep the comment box open, and am truly grateful to the few who stop by.

All that exposed, I must emphasize how stoked I am by OEBooks overall success. The numerous compliments I receive via email, the trust I’m seeing in readers reading those books I highly regard, and paralleled to the low number of comments, my reader stats are also impressive. It all confirms OEBooks is doing her thing. I mean, on top of converting my first nonreader, every time I come across a comment highlighting a nonreader who read a book I thought highly of, and they LOVED the book, I smile another trip to the moon. I don't have enough hands to now count how many trips I've made!

Tomorrow OEBooks will host her first guest post written by an author who has a new book out. I’m still feeling my way through reading fiction, but hope to add the title to my to-read list. So please, stop back by to check out another reading-writing adventure.

Disclaimer: Ok, so we know this post was really about showing off more of my art.