I hate making decisions…….

Okay, so I really don’t hate making decisions. But the truth is that I am a compulsive decision maker. By that I mean that  I can and will make a decision in the blink of an eye. Without really thinking things through. That’s just who I am. I’ve always been that way.

But here lately I’ve really been contemplating a lot of things. And these things have to deal with my blog. One day I’m ready to throw in the towel and close my blog completely. The next day I want to buy a domain. I just don’t know what I want to do anymore.

On the one hand I love my blog. Obviously I love to read and share my thoughts about the books that I read. I love interacting with the people who read my blog and the other bloggers out there. I enjoy tweaking my blog and making changes and making things look better and more creative. But then it’s also a lot of work. And I’m not all that well-known in the book blog-o-sphere. In a recent post to one of my Yahoo reading groups, I likened myself to someone being lost in the middle of New York City. And that’s honestly how I feel sometimes. I have been blogging since 2008 when the book blog world was still relatively small. Now it’s booming and I just feel like I’m lost with no place to go. I feel torn about this.

I have made some great connections with different publishers/publicists. I enjoy receiving ARCs for books that I would never have found on my own. But at the same time, I don’t have all the connections that a lot of people have. I don’t get pitched some of the really good books that I would die to get.

I have some really great loyal followers who I love interacting with. They are usually the smaller bloggers like myself and I know immediately who they are when I get the notification email that I have a new comment waiting for me.

I like hosting giveaways but I tend not to because I have such low participation. I have tried to publicize myself in every way that I can possibly think of, but I am starting to run out of ideas. I don’t necessarily want to have so many readers/commenters that I can’t keep up, but I would like to be able to host a giveaway and have more than a handful of people sign up.

I would like to think that I have found my niche. I have always been completely, 100% true to who I am on this blog. I have not tried to represent myself as someone who I’m not. For the longest time I never really tried to bump up my readership to the massive amounts that some people get. Why? Because that’s not who I am. But this year I have been participating in more memes and commenting more. But I’m still kind of unknown. Heck, I don’t even have a completely original blog title anymore for there’s actually a few others out there that are so close to mine it’s kind of scary.

Do you want to know how the book blogger world sometimes feels to me? It feels like a popularity contest. And that’s not what I’m here for. That’s not what I want out of this.

I wish I knew what I wanted to do. But I just don’t. I keep wondering to myself how long the book blogs are going to last. When are they going to run their course? I know it’s going to happen someday, it’s just a matter of when.

Because here’s the deal: I don’t see myself still doing this in a few years. Next year, definitely. But after that? Who knows. One thing that I have contemplated is to start a new blog that encompasses everything about me, not just the book reviews, and transferring all of my old content. Because I also have a life outside my blog … I enjoy cooking and sharing recipes. I have the cutest dog in the world (okay, that’s my biased opinion!) that I could share funny stories about. I hope that I will eventually be embarking on a pregnancy journey.

But the down side to changing blogs is that I will lose a lot of the connections that I have already made. I will alienate a lot of people who are just here for book reviews. Can you see why I’m so torn about this?? I have considered just starting to implement all those things here on the blog, but as I said earlier: I’m worried about alienating the few readers that I already have. I have also considered just changing the title of my blog to be more all-encompassing, but keeping my current site address, although I have thought that doing so would make things confusing.

So my question to you, dear readers, is this: have you contemplated where you see your blog going? In a year? Two years? Five? What about registering a domain if you haven’t already? And what do you think about me saying that the book blogger world feels like a popularity contest? Do you agree or disagree? Let’s start a discussion!!