Happy 2nd Birthday to BookFox!

BookFox turns the ripe old age of two today. Since blog years are like dog years, that’s pretty old. On this date two years ago I posted a quasi-jealous rant after listening to a reading at Dutton’s with Jonathan Safran Foer, and that spawned this blog that has moved from Blogger to WordPress to Typepad yet never lost its focus on reporting book news, interviews, tidbits and other literary items. Overall, I think that I’ve stayed true to restricting the topics here to literature — no pictures of the kid, or long diatribes about Mrs. BookFox, or random movie reviews. Which must be the first rule of blogs: only write posts about the blog focus. Which requires a lot of discipline, I know. I have opinions and think of stories all the time that don’t fit – so I don’t post them.

Surveying this past year, I feel that BookFox grew from podunk-land into professional territory. The first year of blogging, unless you already have a pre-existing platform, is about building ethos: showing everyone you’re around for the long haul, not a flash in the pan. Oh, and also building connections with fellow bloggers, figuring out some staple features, ironing out your blog design, seeing if you really do have something to say at least two, preferably three times a week, and building a backlog of material that hikes up your Google ranking and provides fodder for search engines. Whew. Yes, that’s first year. And often there is not much reward the first year. Hit counts are low, especially at the beginning. You can feel like you’re speaking into the void. (Hmm, sounds a little bit like many acts of writing, especially fiction writing, or publishing in lit journals.)

For me, the second year of blogging involved restricting my content – at Christmas, I decided to try to specialize, to focus more on the short story world. I haven’t done it exclusively, but it still offers the blog a more unique flavor. Some of the best blogs out there are very specialized – I’m thinking of the Literary Saloon, with a focus on fiction in translation, or Moorish Girl, with a focus on Arabic literature. That’s also my advice to people wanting to join the lit blog fray – to specialize. Because the recent explosion in lit blogs over the past year, as mentioned in Dan Green’s explanation of why the Litblog Co-op failed, means that there are too many people to listen to, and hundreds of overlapping communities. Which is not a negative state of affairs, in any sense, but any publication should have a particular identity that sets it off from other publications, and lit blogs are no different.

The second year of blogging also forced me to come around to some things I’d been procrastinating on. Advertising: banners and links to Amazon. Interviews. Better round-ups. It was also nice to start to feel accepted, as The Guardian linked to my post on Robbe-Grillet, and the LA Times reposted my vlogging at the Festival of Books, and when any number of my colleagues or primetime sites responded to one of my posts, which started to happen much more regularly. I noted this curious state of affairs in the second year: first year, people who link to you are often known to you, but second year, I found links to my blog all the time on newbie sites. You know, ones with two posts and a couple of sidebar items on a Blogger platform. And I’m one of three literary links.

I do have some regrets. I regret that I didn’t buy www.bookfox.com, because some Chinese language website stole it. I regret that I didn’t name my site Book DJ, because then I could have a cool subtitle, like “spinning for the literates in LA.” Okay, that’s not all that cool. But I know that I feel like a DJ sometimes, as I dish out a steady stream of hot new stories and authors, introducing my readers to what’s good and what’s not. I regret not keeping up with one of my first features on the site, Literary Mix Tapes, which involved three paragraphs from three books all on one topic (Sex, Words, Death). Beware – I might just resurrect that one in the future. It’s still in my back pocket.

But I am excited about the future. I was excited to get some on-camera action for video blogging, and am planning to do another round at BookExpo. I have been enjoying writing book reviews for several publications this year. The real beauty of blogs is that only your own ingenuity and perseverance bars you from greatness. There are, quite literally, an infinite number of intriguing things to do with a blog, and you have to do is follow through (the podcasting reign of Edward Champion comes to mind),

On my first birthday, I said that I needed to keep up my journaling. That hasn’t happened. Also, I said I needed to not let blogging eclipse my short story writing. Well, it’s true that blogging can occasionally occupy time that might be spent tuning up a short story. So since my resolutions for last year were miserable failures, I’m not going to renew them or come up with any new ones. Hah! That’s one way to avoid failure.

I can’t say that I haven’t toyed with quitting at times. I have my down moments. But barring travel abroad, I’ve never had a prolonged period without posting. I just might be addicted. And I also wonder what’s in the future. I admire what The Millions has done by creating a multi-person blogging site, and wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t jump in with a fellow blogger, combining forces for double the literary wisdom. Or whether I could land a job as a hired gun, writing for some newspaper blog or corporate blog. I can’t promise that I wouldn’t jump at the opportunity, but so far, I have really enjoyed the process of Bookfox, and I am excited to see how it will expand over the next year.

Until the third birthday,
All my literary self is yours,
John Matthew Fox