(This photo has absolutely nothing to do with the post.)
Over the past few months, I’ve been noticing an increasing level of controversy in the blogosphere (oh, how I hate that word) surrounding the issue of blogging for money. Bangs and a Bun and A Thrifty Mrs have both addressed the topic this week, and I’ve found myself wholeheartedly agreeing with what they’ve had to say, and specifically, with this:
Amen to that, sister.
And yet, this attitude that Muireann talks about is one that comes up again and again. I’ve read SO many negative comments about pro-bloggers now, ranging from the sneeringly contemptuous “People actually think they can make a living out of blogging? How sad!” to the oft-repeated view that blogging should only ever be a hobby, and that those who turn it into a career are somehow “selling out” or letting the side down. “I blog for MYSELF!” these people cry, proudly. “I would NEVER try to make money from my blog!”
Well, I blog for myself too: this site, for instance, doesn’t carry any advertising, and therefore doesn’t make me a penny. But I also blog for money: Shoeperwoman, The Fashion Police and Hey, Dollface! are all commercial blogs, which were set up as business concerns, with the sole aim of making money. And they do make money. Not a huge amount of it, granted – I’m not going to be selling up and moving to the Caribbean any time soon – but enough for me to have been able to make blogging my career, and the sole source of my income. This makes me something of a pariah in certain sectors of the blogging community, but I have absolutely no shame about the way I choose to earn my living, and here’s why:
When I first started blogging, back in 2006, I had absolutely no idea that it was something I could hope to make a living out of. I was a freelance journalist at the time, and Forever Amber was just a natural extension of the Livejournal I’d kept for years at that point – and, I guess, of the dozens of paper journals I’d faithfully recorded my life in from the age of 11 onwards. (I still have them. I can’t read them without wanting to go back in time and slap my younger self.)
(This photo has nothing to do with the post either.)
It didn’t occur to me that I could make money out of blogging until I started freelancing for Shiny Media in 2007. And when the penny finally dropped that hey, some people were actually making money out of writing about shoes and dresses, and that it may as well be me, it didn’t occur to me that there was anything controversial about that. It still doesn’t, if I’m honest. All I thought was that if there was an opportunity for me to make a living out of doing something I loved, I was sure as hell going to take it.
I would challenge anyone presented with that opportunity to turn their back on it. Isn’t that the dream, after all? That you find a way to turn a hobby into a career, and no longer have to dread Monday mornings, or stand in the shower wishing you could vanish down the plughole instead of going into work? It was for me. It was MY dream. (Turning a hobby into a career, I mean, not blogging specifically. When I was a kid, I didn’t go around saying, “When I grow up I want there to be a thing called The Internet and I want to write words about shoes on it. We will call it “blogging”.) I just hadn’t found a way to make it happen yet, and when I finally did, I jumped on it. And I would do it again.
When I set up my commerical blogs, I made no bones about the fact that I was hoping to make some money from them. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy writing for them, or that I’m not passionate about the subject matters those sites cover, because I do, and I am. The reason I chose to create blogs about fashion, shoes and makeup was because I’m interested – sometimes to the point of obsession – in those subjects, and I believed I’d do a better job writing about something I genuinely loved. As corny as it might sound, Terry’s illness had been a bit of a “come to Jesus” moment for me. It had made me realise that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life commuting to a temperature-controlled office every day to do something I didn’t enjoy. We all have to earn a living somehow, but I wanted to earn mine doing something that didn’t feel like a chore to me: blogging was that thing, and it came along at exactly the right time. I will be forever grateful for that.
(Neither does this one. Although I did receive those shoes from a PR company. Sellout!)
Again, I didn’t think for a second that I was “selling out” by creating those sites, or that there was anything even remotely controversial about them. In fact, I viewed them in the same way someone else might view a startup magazine or newspaper. No one tells a newspaper journalist or a feature writer on a fashion magazine that they should write purely “for themselves”, and that taking a salary every month makes them a dirty rotten sellout. In fact, I don’t think there are ANY professions where it’s considered the norm for people to work for nothing, and if there are, I don’t want any part of them. I have to pay the bills somehow, after all. And, you know, buy the shoes.
Of course, one of the main objections to blogging for bucks is the idea that if you’re making money from your blog, you can’t possibly be trusted. So, basically, no one who has adverts on their blog is ever telling the truth. No one who receives a product sample to review is ever able to review it honestly: they just say nice things in order to keep the freebies coming. And, you know, I’m sure there are bloggers like that (Although quite why you’d write a glowing review of a product you hated just so you could get even MORE of the products you hate is beyond me.) We’re not ALL like that, though. It is possibly to blog with integrity AND get paid for it. It’s possible to tell a PR person that sure, they can send over that product (IF it’s something that’s going to be of interest to the readers of the blog), but that you may not choose to review it, and if you do, you’ll do so honestly. If they’re a professional firm, that’s exactly what they’ll expect, anyway.
For me, one of the best things about blogging is that it can be anything you want it to be. If you want it to be a purely creative outlet, then it can. If you want it to be a way to record your life, and to share it with your family and friends, then it can be that, too. And if you want to try and turn it into a career, there’s really nothing stopping you. So if you want to blog purely for yourself, and you have no interest in making money from it then that’s absolutely fine and no one will think any the less of you. As for me, though, I’m going to continue doing my best to make a living out of something I love.
Edited to add: Thanks for all your comments on this, everyone! I just wanted to make it clear that this post wasn’t about criticism I’ve received personally - it was just in response to the various comments I read about pro-blogging in general, which obviously strike a chord with me because it’s what I do!
Yes, it’s another post about people who copy my websites. Sorry, I’d be bored hearing about this by now too, but it really has become the over-riding theme of our lives at the moment, and it makes me so angry I just have to keep on venting. Feel free to scroll on by…
So, remember in my last post, when I said I was particularly angry because although we’d successfully managed to get one host to remove Lin Shuideng’s copy-cat websites, there were no other consequences for this person, who would be free to just start up again with another host?
That’s exactly what happened.
Last night, the website I wrote about last week was reactivated, this time with 600 of my posts copied in their entirety.
And so we begin again. Another Friday, another day spent filing DCMA notices and trying to persuade yet another host to stop the same person, doing the same damn thing. And I know we’ll be successful. The host will remove the site. And then next week? Next week we’ll get to start all over again, with yet another host. As this point I feel like we’re going to spend the rest of our days chasing Lin Shuideng around the internet, and I honestly can’t tell you how dispiriting that is.
On the plus side, I guess we’ll end up with a very streamlined process of filing paperwork and having these sites removed. It still just seems wrong to me, though, that I’ll have to file the same notice, against the same person, over and over and over again, when really, someone like Lin Shuideng should be prevented from registering another domain or buying new hosting space ever again. I know that’s not practical. I don’t have any solution to it. I just know that thanks to Google’s awesome work with their algorithm, before they were removed last week, the copycat sites were ranking higher than Shoeperwoman.com for the articles they’d stolen, which means that I was losing traffic to someone who had just blatantly stolen from me. And the more duplicates there are of my work online (bear in mind that Lin had set up two websites, both containing hundreds of my posts, within the space of a couple of days), the harder it will be for my sites to survive. This is why I can’t just shrug my shoulders and ignore this. It won’t just go away: in fact, it will just get worse.
I also know that “Lin Shuideng” (I still don’t know if that’s a real name, by the way. I assume it isn’t, so I’m just using it as shorthand for “The Mysterious Stranger Who is Hellbent on Destroying My Sanity”) isn’t just stealing work from me. Last week, Terry did a bit of digging, and discovered some other shoe blogs which had been targetted by this person, and which now have illegal duplicates of large numbers of their posts online. Of course, we contacted the bloggers in question to let them know about it, but we notice that the copy sites are still going strong, so obviously they haven’t yet been successful in having them removed either.
Oh, and Terry’s detective work yesterday also turned up ANOTHER site, which has also copied lots of my posts, and this one actually has the cheek to have added the line “What do U think, xoxo Shoeperwoman” to each one. I mean, AS IF I would abuse the letter “U” in that way! And honestly: why would you steal someone’s work and then go out of your way to add the name of the site you’d stolen it from to every single one of the posts? WHY?
We’ve contacted the respective hosts of both of the new copycat sites.
We’re yet to receive a response from either of them.
And so it begins again.
I hope Lin Shuideng and everyone else like him/her is haunted by THAT OLD WOMAN from Insidious until the end of their days. Now THAT would be justice.
UPDATE: The new host removed Lin Shiudeng’s site on Friday night, in response to our DMCA notice. It was back up on Saturday morning, this time containing content stolen from various wedding websites (some of which, admittedly, appear to be free article sites, which would be legal to reproduce). Lin doesn’t really take a hint.
ANOTHER UPDATE: (Saturday, 2pm) I spoke too soon: just got a Google alert letting me know that Lin has set up a new website, with all of its content stolen from me again. Lots of personal photos on it, plus lots of reader-submitted photos from the Shoeper Shoe Challenge, which is really distressing me, because obviously those people didn’t submit those photos to me so they could appear all over the web. So we don’t even get our one-week break this time, we just go straight from fighting to get the last site taken down to fighting to get this new one taken down. Furious. On the plus side, it doesn’t cost us anything but our time to have these sites removed, but it WILL be costing Lin money to have to buy an entire new server every day…
YET ANOTHER UPDATE (Monday 23rd, 10am): We managed to get the latest Lin site taken down within a few hours. Damn, but we’re getting good at this! Terry’s spent most of the weekend tracking down more sites that are scraping our content… may as well get them all while we’re in “DCMA Mode”!
AND ANOTHER ONE! (Monday 23rd, 1:30pm) It turns out that while we were busy getting Lin’s last site taken down on Saturday (because that’s obviously our favourite way to spend the weekend…) Lin was just as busy setting up another one. With hundreds of posts stolen from me. Since last week, getting rid of this one person’s sites has become a full-time job for Terry. Obviously that’s not sustainable for us: no sooner do we get one site removed than another one pops up, and Terry is now spending ALL of his time having this one person’s illegal copies of our sites removed. How is that in any way fair?
I wrote a massive, 2000 word rant about this yesterday morning, just to get it all out of my head, but what it basically boils down to is this:
The hosts of the site which had stolen 500 of my posts removed it on Friday night.
Not without a fight, and not before they’d recommended we hire a lawyer (AGAIN) to have it removed, but they finally, albeit reluctantly, agreed to take it down.
Oh, and they ALSO took down the OTHER site we found on Friday, which:
- was ALSO registered to Lin Shuideng.
- was ALSO hosted by the same US company which was hosting the first site.
- ALSO contained around 500 of my posts, copied and pasted in their entirety, complete with images and watermarks. In fact, it was the SAME 500 posts the first site had stolen.
I don’t get much luck with this kind of thing, do I?
Oh, and Lin Shuideng? Had around 300 domains. As far as we can tell, they were ALL hosting stolen material. This person wasn’t just ripping off me, he/she was ripping off HUNDREDS of people. So if the hosts had stuck to their guns, they would have required a possible 300 people to hire 300 lawyers, to file 300 pieces of paperwork, to stop ONE PERSON BLATANTLY breaking the law.
Because that would be fair.
In the end, the hosts DIDN’T remove Lin Shuideng’s hosting account because of the theft of copyrighted work. No, they said they’d found mysterious “other issues” with it, which had forced them to remove it. I’m not sure what could be worse, in hosting terms, than stealing from 300 people, but whatever it was, it got them to take down the two sites that were ripping me off, to my great relief.
I say “relief”. To be honest, I’m still mad as hell about all of this. And not just because yet another working day was lost, spent fighting an intellectual property thief, rather than doing the work I’m so far behind with, but because I don’t feel justice can really be said to have been done here. Sure, Lin Shuideng will have woken up the next morning to find that his/her illegal websites had all vanished into the ether, and that must’ve been a bit of a bummer. But… that’s it. There are no other consequences for this person, who will surely just start again on another host. Three hundred illegal websites is not a small thing. It is not an insignificant thing (not in a business sense, anyway). It is large-scale theft, and yet it will go totally unpunished, and there will be absolutely nothing to prevent this person going on to do exactly the same thing again.
That’s the way it is, though. If someone steals your physical property, the law will protect you for free. If someone steals your intellectual property, the law will extract a large sum of money from you in order to protect you. If you don’t want to, or can’t afford to pay, the criminal will be allowed to go on breaking the law, and that’s not fair.
We’re now waiting for Lin Shuideng (or the NEXT Lin Shuideng) to pop up somewhere else, stealing more of our content. It was Shoeperwoman.com this time, but next time it could be TheFashionPolice.net, or it could be this site. Or it could be YOUR site. Isn’t that a worrying thought?
I just published the following statement over at Shoeperwoman, but figured good news bears repeating. And really, the sight of Rubin in shoes never really gets old, does it?
“Following on from the trademark dispute I told you about last month, I’m very pleased to announce that following negotiations between our lawyers and the owner of the Shoeper-Woman.co.uk website, we have now reached an agreement, in light of which the owner has rebranded, transferred domain ownership to us and withdrawn the Trademark application that conflicted with our website name.
Obviously this has been a difficult and stressful time for everyone involved, and we’re happy to be able to draw a line under it and get on with the important business of talking about shoes. Once again, we’d like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has supported us throughout this: we will now be continuing with our own trademark application, and hope that, if granted, this will help give our brand additional security in future.
Thanks again for everyone’s help and support: it really does mean the world to us.
P.S. As a courtesy towards the other party in this dispute, we have agreed not to name either her or her new business name, and we’d appreciate it if you could refrain from mentioning these names in the comments here.”
Unfortunately the fight DOES go on against the site I mentioned in yesterday’s post, which is still live at the time of writing, and I’m still completely mystified as to why on earth it even exists. My current tagline gets truer by the day…
Well, folks, we’re getting scarily close to the final countdown on our trip to California. It’s not quite three weeks to go, but… almost. And to be completely honest with you, this has surprised the hell out of me. When I looked at my calendar in order to find out what number to put in that headline I was all, “HOW many weeks? Surely that must be some mistake?” But no, it’s true: I have roughly three weeks in which to write two months worth of content for two websites (Er, we’re only going to be away for three weeks, but I need to write two months worth because… actually, never mind, it’s too boring to get into. Just trust me.) and I could not be more freaked out by that if I tried.
(Yes, you guessed it: this is my bi-annual “WAH, I HAVE TOO MANY BLOGS, FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS!” post. Oh, don’t say you weren’t expecting it. The truth is that certain other events of the past few weeks have dominated my mind to such an extent that I haven’t even been able to think about the holiday much at all, far less get excited about it, and I’ve managed to get waaaaay behind with my workload. This makes me feel sad. Poor holiday! I will have to make it up to it somehow. Maybe by blogging about in incessantly from now until I leave?)
Anyway, in the next three weeks I need to:
- Write two month’s worth of blog content. No biggie. *assumes hysterical, mad-eyed look*
- Buy a new carry-on of the absolute maximum size possible to take on the flight. I’m planning on doing a bit of shopping over there, you see.
- Book an eye test to enable my next batch of contact lenses to be released to me, as it will be handy to be able to actually SEE California when I get there.
- Come to some kind of decision on the all-important issue of the The Fringe. To trim or not to trim, that is the question? (That actually WAS the question in Shakespeare’s first draft of Hamlet, by the way. They made him change it, which I think was a mistake, because EVERYONE cares about fringes, don’t they? It is the eternal question of our time.)
- Book salon appointment in response to this decision. Or maybe just get Terry to cut it for me?*
- Buy some other random crap that I have decided I MUST HAVE NOW.
- Clean the house from top to bottom. I always do this before taking a trip. It’s in case I die while I’m away and someone else has to come and clear out the house. Like always wearing clean underwear in case you’re in an accident, you know?
- Load some new reading material onto my Kindle.
- Try to remember the one million and one MUST DO things that popped into my mind at 3am last night when I couldn’t sleep, but which I can’t for the life of me remember now.
- Pack.
I should probably get started on all of that…
*JOKING! I’M JOKING! Maybe.
Recent events (inlcuding being threatened with police action for writing a blog post) are somewhat monopolising my time right now, so blogging here may be light. Or, you know, non-existent.
Hope you’ll all stick around until the dust settles…
Tagged people who impersonate me
Those of you who follow me on Twitter are probably already aware of my current battle with a UK-based company who have set up two websites using the name “Shoeperwoman”, which is the name of my shoe blog, and which I’ve been using on the site itself and around the web, for the past two years. Not only is this company using my name on their websites, Facebook and Twitter account, they are also in the process of trying to register the trademark “Shoeperwoman”, which would mean that I would no longer be able to use it, effectively putting an end to two years of hard work and a large part of my income.
I’m not going to say much more about this here, but I’ve written a lengthy post over at Shoeperwoman (er, MY Shoeperwoman, I mean. The original one.), if you would like to read it. I’m posting this here in a bid to publicise this issue – obviously if this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone with a blog, and I would really, really appreciate any support in the form of links to the post, re-tweets etc. Click here to read it.
I think that’s almost every aspect of my self and Internet presence been copied or stolen by someone now. I’m thinking of pitching my own reality TV show: Forever Amber: the most imitated woman in the UK…
Tagged people who impersonate me
(*This title totally made me think of lots of little men in overalls running around inside my blog and going, “Well, we can fix it, love… but it’s going to cost you..”.)
1. What technology do you use in blogging? (computer, camera, video camera, tripod, etc…)
Um, let me think… I have a Sony Vaio laptop (don’t ask me the spec, I have no idea! It’s a silver one, kinda rectangular: that do you?), a Nikon D5000 DSLR camera, a tripod and a remote. And an iPhone, but I mostly just use that for obsessively checking comments/stats/Twitter etc, so I’m not sure if it counts.
2. What computer and online technology do you use? (blogging system, photo storage, photo editing tools, etc..)
All of my blogs are on WordPress – I’ve used Blogger, Typepad and Moveable Type in my time, but think WordPress is head and shoulders above the rest: love it! For photo storage, all of my photos are stored on our server, and we have a removable hard disk for backups. I do have a Flickr account, but I stopped using it a few months ago, after all of the “people stealing my photos” drama went down. (The photos weren’t being stolen from Flickr, I hasten to add, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to streamline things a little, and have the photos only available on my blogs.) I use Photoshop for editing: it’s taken a long time to get the hang of it, but I’m learning!
3. What is your process for taking pictures?
I don’t think I have anything as formal as a “process”! I just get ready, then either harass Terry into taking the photos for me, or set up the tripod and do it myself.
4. When it comes to backdrops for your photos what do you consider? Do you scout locations or shoot the same spot daily?
A bit of both: if I’m out somewhere and I come across something that might make a good backdrop, I’ll make a mental note to go back with the camera when I have the chance, but I also take a lot of photos indoors, in the same spot: sometimes the Scottish weather makes it the only option!
5. If you could splurge and get one new piece of equipment what would you be buying?
Um, do shoes count as “equipment”? OK, dresses, then? I actually can’t think of anything I really need right now: we’re pretty much set, and technology isn’t really my strong point (I bet Terry could think of something, though), unfortunately. If I could justify an Amazon Kindle as “essential blogging equipment”, though, I totally would: I think Terry might want his back one day…
Read more over at Modly Chic…
Tagged friend friday
(Dress, ASOS.com; shoes, gift from Deichmann; cardigan: random store in Florida, about 8 years ago)
I’m going to call this week ‘ASOS Week’. I know it’s more traditionally known as Advent, or The Week Before Christmas, or SNOW HELL or whatever (actually, just speaking of that, it occurred to me that after the last two winters, our seasons will probably have to be re-named, and we will have Spring, Summer, Autumn and SNOW HELL), but for me it’s going to be ASOS week. It’s completely unintentional, but every year one retailer will suddenly begin making clothes as if with me, and me alone, in mind. Item after item they will produce, and every one I will covet, and will probably buy. Every time I look at that retailer’s website, I will see something that seems to cry “AMBER! AMBER! BUY ME! LOVE ME! THEN, IN A FEW MONTHS, COMPLETELY DISCARD ME IN FAVOUR OF SOMETHING ELSE!” And so it goes.
Most of the time, as you’ll have seen from my frenzied holiday shopping last week, Zara (and occasionally Mango) will shoulder the burden of being named Official Outfitters to the Amber. This year, however, ASOS.com stepped up to the plate, and I suddenly found myself in possession of, um, more than one of their dresses. In fact, I even own more than one of this very dress you see me wearing today, as you’ll see later in ASOS week.
But enough of this dress chatter, for today I have more serious matters to discuss. This morning, you see, I was accused of something so shocking I can hardly bring myself to type it. Yes, people, someone used the comments section of The Fashion Police to accuse me of… of…oh God, I just can’t say it… to accuse me of running adverts on my websites in order to MAKE MONEY. The person said that it was “pretty clear what I was about” and that what I was about was “MONEY” (their caps), and that I was making this MONEY while… wait for it… “lurking as a real fashion site.” (Their poor command of English. “Lurking”? Really? I DO NOT LURK!)
I. AM. SO. BUSTED.
I mean, I don’t know how they found me out, or what Scooby Doo-style shenanigans went into uncovering my clever and dastardly conspiracy, but I can see I’m dealing with a powerful foe here, so I’m just going to hold my hands up and admit it: it’s true, people. I AM placing adverts on my websites in order to make money. I know, it’s shocking. I’m sorry. Here, have a sniff off the smelling salts, quick…
I just don’t know what gave it away. I’d always assumed I’d covered my tracks pretty well all these longs years, and that no one would ever suspect that my true motive in having adverts on the sites was the making of money. (Sorry: MONEY.) I thought people would look at the adverts and think they were, I dunno, just pretty pictures or something? I thought people would look at the number of blogs I have, and the amount of posts that go on to them every day, and think I just had a helluva lot of time on my hands?
I don’t, though. In fact, I’m just a dastardly money-maker, and it’s time I stopped living a lie, readers. So now you know. I hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me…
A MONEY maker, lurking as a real fashion blog
P.S. I can’t believe I forgot to mention that as well as being accused of making MONEY, the person also charged me with the offence of BEING A SHOP. Apparently all of the posts I write on The Fashion Police are actually thinly veiled adverts for “my” products, which I sell in my “shop”. And I advertise them by writing posts talking about how ugly the things are, in some kind of twisted bid to make people disagree with me and then punish me by buying the thing from me, presumably. Seriously, you couldn’t make this up…
Tagged I am not a shop, outfits
My Dressember Day 3 post is coming soon, and so is a massive rant, just to warn you. In the meantime, here’s this week’s Friend Friday, which is on the subject of blogging, and knowing when to quit…
1. How many hours a week do you spend blogging? Has that number changed since you started blogging?
Probably anything up to ten hours per day, five days per week: sometimes more, occasionally less. To put that in perspective, though (and, er, make it seem a bit less like an unhealthy obsession), blogging is my job, so it’s not like I’m sitting in an office from 9-5 and THEN coming home and blogging for ten hours. Blogging is my 9-5, even although I don’t keep anything like those hours (Becoming a small business owner turned me into a workaholic, and trust me, that’s not a word I’d ever have associated with myself before…), and I have three blogs to update daily, not including this one. That’s not all writing time, of course – I’m also including the time I spend researching posts, managing the sites, taking photos, and all of the other background stuff that’s part and parcel of professional blogging. I try not to blog on the weekends, but I will always check-in on comments, stats, Twitter etc, which is technically “work”, even although it often doesn’t feel like it. The presence of an iPhone in my life, and my compulsion to constantly check my email etc on it means that blogging is never very far from my mind!
The hours I spend on it haven’t changed too much since I started: if anything, I’ve reduced the hours a little because back in the early days I would work seven days per week, with very little difference between weekends and week days. After a while, though, I realised that was a one-way ticket to Insanity Central, so these days I try to keep the weekends blog-free, and I’ve been making a bigger effort to take some time off in the evenings too. And I also have Fi and Caroline writing for one of the sites too, now, which has been a huge help.
2. There is always more you can do, write, read, comment on… how do you limit your time spent on these tasks?
I have quite a strict blogging routine, which I try to stick to: it involves writing as many of my weekly posts in advance as I can, leaving me the rest of the time to do all of the other stuff. Sounds good in theory, but in practice the actual content creation frequently eats up almost all of my time (I can never predict how long it’ll take me to find something I want to write about: some days it comes easy, other days it takes hours) and I end up sitting at my computer at midnight feeling like I haven’t done even half of the things I’d wanted to get done that day. I’m working on ideas to free up more time, though: hopefully by next year things will be a little easier…
3. Have you experienced Blogger burnout yet? How have you dealt with that?
Yup, frequently. The only way I know of to deal with it is to switch of the computer and walk away – and by that I mean far away. This is why I value my holidays so much: if I’m at home I find it really difficult to switch off, because the compulsion to check comments, check email, or write one more post is always there, and because I have an overly-developed guilt complex which means that I feel guilty if I’m at home but am not working. If I don’t have a handy vacation planned, a day-trip or something will also work: anything that gets me out of the house and away from the computer!
4. This time of the year is always a lot busier than any other time. Will your blogging change as a result?
Ha! Yes! Because I blog for a living, I don’t have the luxury of being able to just shut the blogs down when I’m not here (well, I can, but if I do, people yell at me, and I also don’t earn much money, so it’s not a great idea), so I have to write all of those posts in advance. It’s by far my least favourite part of the job, but the holidays are always worth it.
5. Could you forsee a moment in which you are not blogging anymore? How would you you identify that it’s time to walk away?
I actually decided to give up this blog earlier this year, and didn’t update for over a month. At the time, I felt that no one was really reading any more, and I started to question what the point was of putting so much of myself and my life online if no one was interested in hearing about it. When I made the decision to quit I was pretty sure it would be permanent, but as the weeks passed I started to miss it: something would happen, and I’d think, “Ooh, I must blog about that!” and then remember that nope, I wasn’t doing that any more… it was a strange feeling because I think blogging had become such an ingrained habit by then that it was hard to give it up. So I started up again in September, and I think the break did me some good, because I’ve been enjoying it much more since then. With that said, if it did reach the stage again where I felt like no one was reading, or if it started to have a negative impact on my life, then yes, I would walk away. People always tell you to write for yourself, but it’s actually really hard to do that online: you always have to be aware of the fact that you’re ultimately writing for an audience, and if that audience were to disappear, then I would take it as a sign that it was time to go back to a private journal.
With my other blogs, the idea of giving up is obviously more complex because I wouldn’t just be giving up a blog, I’d be giving up a job, and in order for me to be able to do that, I’d have to have some other form of income. At the moment, I can’t really imagine what that would be: I know I never want to go back to a “traditional” job, but I guess another business idea could tempt me away from blogging – I just don’t know what that idea might be yet!
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