BTS Book Reviews December 2013 | Page 9

The Lowdown with Laurie Laurie Garrison Book blogging is a hobby that’s a labor of love; it’s not something that makes money. Most people think opening and running a review blog is a grand thing. Well, if you ask most book bloggers, you will find a totally different story. Most book bloggers are burned out by our third year because of the load we carry. This load will either cause us to change our ways on how we blog and to go back to it as a hobby or just simply shut our blogs down from the stress. Your average reader or most authors, for that matter, have no clue about the time and money we spend on our hobby. We give countless hours reading and writing our reviews. Then let’s not forget the hours of time we spend sharing our posts on all kind of social media to get the word out, be it for a review or a guest post. There are days where most of us beat our heads on the desk asking ourselves why we even started blogging in the first place. Granted, there are a lot of advantages of running a review blog, like meeting new bloggers and authors, but there aretimes when things get out of control, and some will have to back off. A Labor of Love When I stated my blog over four years ago, I never knew what a book blog would turn in to. Heck, it’s a hobby, not something that would spin out of control. I live a full life with lots of other hobbies.So since Bitten has basically taken over my life, it feels more like a job with no pay to me. This December 2013 | 9