Over the last several years, Kimberly and I have changed a lot in our lives, and over the last several years, blogging itself has changed significantly.
So, we’re taking the opportunity to work with our life changes, as well as the changing tides of blogging, to announce we’re shifting a little bit of our work here at Stacked.
We’ll still be writing as normal, covering the same topics and interests we normally do, but we’ll be cutting back a bit to a guaranteed posting three times a week. I’ll be writing on Mondays, Kimberly on Wednesdays, and then our regular round-up of our work in other spaces on Fridays.
This is for several reasons.
First, both Kim and I have found that traffic patterns and readership here, while still growing, has definitely changed. This is largely in part due to how people interact with blogs now. Without Google Reader, discovery is different and the work involved in daily social promotion on our end takes away from reading and writing. We’re finding that the bulk of our traffic now comes through search — people are looking for reviews of a specific book or a book list and they’re finding us that way. They aren’t clicking through to posts via Twitter, and they click through via places like Tumblr when it’s a book list and often, that comes when the desire for reading comes, rather than immediately (in other words, bookmarking). This is an awesome thing to learn, since it helps us think through what we can write about that’s useful to readers.
Likewise, both Kimberly and I are working hard on projects outside of Stacked relating to books, reading, and writing. We want to be able to give the best of ourselves here, without sacrificing on those other ventures, and to do so, we’d rather cut back a little here, rather than try to create a lot of filler (we’ve seen those blogs and what happens to them — not our thing).
Another small change you may see on my end is a cessation of long form reviews. I’m finding them to not only be tedious to write, but the rewards aren’t particularly high and those posts tend to see the least amount of traffic and roughly zero interaction. I’m sure as soon as I post this, I’ll read the book that begs me to write a lengthy review of, but it’s a thing I plan on stepping back from, with the hopes of doing more thematic round-ups on titles with shorter, more to-the-point reviews.
If you’re curious about peeking behind the curtain a bit, here it is: Kimberly has been working on building a side venture in critiquing. It might be the perfect time to talk with her if you’ve got a manuscript you’re looking for solid, critical feedback on.
As of right now, I’m not taking on new clients for my own critiquing. I will when the new year rolls around. My big projects right now include continued work on Feminism for the Real World, as well as (dun dun DUN) finally working on this novel that’s been in my head and in various forms of notes for a few years now.
We’re still here and we’re still going to be here. It’ll just be a little more substantive and a little less frequently — though really, three times a week is still more regular than many book blogs today. We’ll be taking our normal end-of-year two-week vacation, too, so we’ll have a few more weeks of posts coming in 2015 before another short break and we’re back in high action in 2016. . . which will be heading into our 8th year of blogging here. That is roughly 5.3 times longer than the years I spent in graduate school and twice as long as I spent in college, which is weird to think about.
Thanks as always for being readers. Remember, too, we’re always happy to hear your ideas or interests in features or book lists. Just leave a comment or shoot us an email at stacked.books [[at]] gmail.
For anyone wondering: the winner of the massive feminist YA giveaway has been notified and I’ll be building your amazing book recommendation list soon! There were over 300 entries, so there are a lot of great titles to make sure I get on the list.
