Over the past year or so, I've noticed a new trend. Bloggers I follow (often with their own custom built WordPress blogs) have been abandoning their domains in droves to begin fresh with Substack, even though their old blogs still appear to be extremely interactive and frequently visited. This suggests they must expect a lot from this new platform. My daughter, who is in her mid-twenties, recommended that I follow their lead. She went so far as to tell me that she only ever reads articles or opinion pieces on Substack. If a post from a Google blog like this one popped up on her search engine, she claims she'd scroll straight past.
That surprised me. 'Even if it's a topic that really interests you?'
'Yes.'
Whoa, did you know platform snobbery of this nature is so rampant? It seems to be especially the case with the younger generation. My youngest son tells me he admires humble blogs on vintage platforms, but he might be an outlier.
Anyway, back to these bloggers and their new Substack accounts. Since I enjoy these people's writing, I subscribed to their Substacks, careful to remain on their free settings. As a low income family, if I start paying subscription fees to read people's material that used to be free, the budget will balloon into something unaffordable in a flash. It's not that I don't think thought-provoking writing deserves pay, because I definitely do. I simply can't afford to allocate money which is already spread to its limit to read bloggers' content. And getting selective about whose Substack I'd be prepared to pay for when many people have started putting a price on it isn't a road I want to travel down.
But I've considered my daughter's suggestion, and do understand some of Substack's appeal. It seems to have a simple start-up process, a nifty way of dropping into followers' in-boxes, and that option to try to earn a bit of money by charging readers to access some articles. I've been told it's also a great forum for writers of all types to rub virtual shoulders. In many ways, jumping off Blogger to begin over there seems like a sound move for possibly gaining more traction and followers.
There's just one thing though. I'm still invested heavily into this blog!
My heart doesn't want to jump ship to some new, trendy platform. During this past decade, people have recommended that I change to WordPress or try writing on Medium. While I was still assessing the Medium idea, that platform seemed to fade from my radar, although I know it is still around being used. (And see here, my justification for leaving Bookstagram which I did try my best at for a while.) But now Substack is surging to the fore.
I've spent every week since 2014 adding to my history here. When I introduce new pages with common themes, it feels a bit like adding new wings to my castle. What's more, my dedicated building has begun to reap benefits by showing up high on search engines. Often when I google some vintage book or other, my reviews pop up near the very top. Over a decade of quiet, regular updating seems to have bestowed on this blog a credibility of its own, which even search engines seem to pick up on in their own impersonal way. My blog has taken years of steady updates to nudge search engines that it is around, filling a valuable spot. I'm loath to turn my back on that by starting over fresh with Substack.
This is an extremely modest blog, which is undoubtedly evident, but page views remain in triple or quadruple figure averages, which increase over time. (Surely they can't all be bots!!!) I don't often see these readers, for they rarely comment, but I appreciate this secret evidence that they're out there. Some of my blog posts do amazingly well. My ranking of the Bronte sisters' seven books has collected around 20000 views to date. My pages on my Trixie Belden Marathon and the Pollyanna series have also got far higher traffic than I expected.
Hopefully the readers who visit are researching, browsing quietly, saving links, and simply enjoying my takes on books, both vintage and in the current spotlight. The stats seem to promise that they are.
Hey, I invite you to type 'The Vince Review' into the Google toolbar of your phone and wait for the AI blurb to pop up. It consistently boosts my mood with its accurate (and complimentary) summaries of what I do here.
In a nutshell, I'm going to doggedly stay put. This blog is not trending or going viral or being talked about, and that will never happen. I know nothing about adding bells and whistles and incentives. But I have reason to believe it is quietly doing its job. It serves as a reading room, a quiet resource library of sorts, where people can pop in, spend some enjoyable minutes or hours, take what they need, and hopefully return.
This blog is over a dozen years old as I write, which can't be said for too many. I read somewhere that the average lifespan of a blog before they crash and burn is three to four years. So I'll resist the siren call of Substack, or any other shiny new platform, and still be here in the future with reliably free content. And I'll finish with this friendly reminder that you are welcome to subscribe to my feed in the toolbar, and then it will show up in your inbox anyway, even though it is not Substack.
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