I’ve been writing this blog since 2007, and odds are I’ll keep going for the foreseeable future. Why do I do it?
The truth is, Books in Northport does not have a huge readership. None of its posts has ever “gone viral.” Occasionally (and the occasions are rare) someone struck by a certain thought or story of mine here will share a post with a friend or put a link on Facebook, but my readers are more generally content to enjoy for themselves, quietly. Even comments to any particular post are uncommon.
And when I look at my stats (which no, I am not going to share publicly, thank you very much), I see that 2017 was the high-water readership mark for this blog. (Six years ago. Should that make me sad?) The statistics give only numbers and a jagged line climbing to a sharp peak before falling again – no indication why more people were reading me in that year than any other.
What did I write about in 2017? I did a lot of book reviews that year. There were adventures in the Southwest. (But I still do book reviews and recount adventures, when I have any to recount.) There was the launch of Sarah Shoemaker’s novel, Mr. Rochester, a lot of my personal musings (examples here and here), topics literary, historical, social and political pleas (here's an example of that kind of thing), and small personal and local observations here and there, as snippets of my small-town bookselling life dog-paddled furiously to survive in a stormy sea of national chaos. Because that's how I remember 2017 -- as a plunge into national chaos.
Did readers find my questions similar to ones they were asking themselves that year, or were they seeking refuge from disturbing questions in books and in someone else’s life?
Because maybe, I’m thinking, it wasn’t my writing or subject matter that caused the spike at all but simply a new kind of chaos that drove more people that year to online forums in general. And now, maybe we have gradually become accustomed to chaos and have given up any attempt either to escape fully or to understand. Maybe recipes and dogs and word puzzles and jigsaw puzzles on Facebook are more tranquilizing, and therefore more appealing, than anything I could possibly write. Whatever!
Numerous suggestions for increasing website audience can be found online, if marketing is your aim or popularity (numbers) your goal. I had a professional group “reach out” to me a few years back, offering to provide more exciting “content” to my blog than I had come up with myself. Unlike the Queen, I was amused, because while my bookstore often appears on this site, as do books, I’m not writing advertising copy. Most simply put, this is my life I'm sharing – certain aspects of it, anyway: books read, travels enjoyed, adventures undertaken, thoughts entertained, questions that plague me, as well as (to steal from Carl Jung) memories, dreams, reflections -- regardless of how many or how few friends or strangers may be interested.
Poet Fleda Brown, on her blog, "The Wobbly Bicycle," writes that she has not been writing poems lately but a diary instead, which she approaches as a literary project, in hopes that it will eventually be published. Another writer whose work I admire told me at one point that he felt I had found my “form” in blog posts, and more than one friend (both writers and nonwriters) suggests now and again that Books in Northport could be turned into a book. Is it motivation I lack or energy or something else? Others have done it, so the idea itself is not absurd. -- But a bound volume of my originally digital words without accompanying images (related or unrelated, today's being the latter) and embedded links? It would be, I’m thinking, more hole than cloth.
There’s no Big Question here today. No plan for the future. No sudden epiphany. Idle speculation, merely, after four housebound days of clouds and rain and wind and a few snow flurries and a dead car battery, so, as always, take it or leave it.
