Let’s Talk Bookish – When a Post Doesn’t Do Very Well

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme, hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books & Dani @ Literary Lion, where they discuss certain topics, share their opinions, and spread the love by visiting each others’ posts.

NOVEMBER 5: WHEN A POST DOESN’T DO VERY WELL (SUGGESTED BY NICOLE @ THOUGHTS STAINED WITH INK)

Prompts: Imagine you’ve spent several hours, even days, perfecting a post that you’re so excited to publish. Finally, you hit publish and eagerly await the response. But the response is not as much as you’d expected, or worse, it’s nonexistent. Has that happened to you before? How do you handle poor post results? Do you think there’s usually a cause for poor post results?

Welcome to the first LTB of November everyone! I don’t know about where you all are, but where I am it has already begun to feel very cold and wintery. All the better to distract myself from that by writing a blog post. Today’s topic is something that we’ve recently discussed here at DTRH between Andge and I. I’ll try and expand on this a bit below.

I think in general we try not to post for the direct gratification of people liking and giving us a response, as this could likely lead to unhealthy addictions. Of course, that being said, we are trying to build up a following and push out content that we enjoy, and we definitely wish every post was super successful. I wouldn’t say we don’t care about the responses, but we certainly hope for the engagement, as that is the whole point of us posting content that we’d think you all would like!

For the most part I don’t think any of our posts really has us slaving for days, but of course there is a lot of pre-planning and idea brainstorming ahead of time that goes into it. Despite all this, some things just take more time but don’t get the proportionate responses – and that’s okay! I think it’s best not to put yourself too deep in a hole for things beyond your control; sometimes there are inexplicable factors involved.

Recently, Andge and I have discussed a period of time where engagement was very low, but there was no visible change in anything that we did. Sometimes this just happens! We have kept to our schedule for almost a year now, and yet sometimes a month will just be silent for whatever reason. I think we were both a bit confused at the idea, yet we just kept at it – sure enough, the next month was back to normal. I’m sure there’s plenty of reasons why it might have happened, but it’s not too important in the grand scheme of things.

I’m sure there was some sort of cause that is beyond my knowledge, but I try not to contemplate it too much. That kind of thinking probably won’t be productive. I try to stick to the fact that I (we) love posting for you all, and that I enjoy doing it no matter what the engagement is. In the end, this is supposed to be fun, after all!

What do you all think or do when a post doesn’t seem to reach? I’d love to hear what other strategies there are to try and improve engagement too. Let me know in the comments below! I already love all of you who reach out regularly, it really does make my day sometimes.

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