4 Years of Blogging

This post is a few days late. Looking through my blog archives, this should have been published on Monday. But, hey, I’m doing better than I have the last three years considering I actually remembered my blogiversary this year. As you might have guessed from the title of this post, I have officially been blogging for 4 years. And that alone blows my mind.

In the past, I never really did anything to mark the day that I first started this blog. Life always got in the way, or I simply forgot. But I feel like I need to do something for 4 years. If you don’t count the sports teams I wan on in middle and high school, this is the longest I’ve ever stuck to anything. I’ll be the first to say that when I first started, I didn’t know I would be sitting here four years later still writing blog posts. 

I started this blog on a whim. It was the summer after my first year of university, the three girls I was going to be living with had gone back home for the summer, I was unemployed and I had A LOT of time on my hands. Before I really realized it, I was going to the bookstore any chance I got, which was often. And I was reading a lot. Reading was always something I had done, but never quite as much as I was that summer. I had no one to talk to about what I was reading and after having discovered a few book blogs, I figured why not? If other people were doing this, I totally could do this. And that’s how Emilie’s Book World came to be. 

This is going to sound cliché, and everyone says this, but I never expected that people would actually read what I had to say, much less would feel like commenting on my reviews. Those first comments on reviews, no matter how short, meant the world to me. It meant that someone actually cared enough to not only read through what I had to say but wanted to show me that they read it. So I kept with it and my blog grew to become what it is today. And I am proud of that.

In four years of blogging I’ve learned a lot. I knew next to nothing about the publishing industry when I started blogging. Now I know the ins and outs of the industry and it’s a field I hope to one day be working in. I’ve also gotten to talk to some of my favourite authors, even meeting some of them in person. Had you told me that was a possibility in four years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’ve had the opportunity to go to amazing events, travelling to New York City to attend one of the biggest publishing conferences in the world. It’s been an incredible four years to say the least. 

The best part of the last four years, though, has been all the people I’ve had the chance to meet. I’ve always had friends, but I never had friends I could discuss books with the way that I can with the people I’ve met through blogging. I’m lucky enough to live in a city where there are other bloggers and these people have become some of my best friends. Sure, books are what brought us together, but though friendships have grown so much past that. I am so happy to have met all these amazing people.

So what’s the point of this rambling post, you ask? It’s so say thank you. Thank you to anyone who has ever read one of my posts, commented on one of my posts, talked to me on Twitter. I probably would have stopped blogging a long time ago if it weren’t for you. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, if I’ll even be in a position to write another one of these posts next year. But I know that so long as I’m still enjoying it, I’ll be blogging.