My follow count scares me

So I got tired of using this author blog just to self-promote and I thought I'd use it to write little short form essays about some book or book-adjacent topics that are important to me. Last time, I wrote an essay that was a defense for dark romance books and dark romance readers, and how policing what girls and women read is so not feminist actually. Today, I'll be writing about followers and numbers and how that affects how I think about myself and my reviews. If people are interested, I have more essays planned on oversharing and how we consume women's trauma memoirs.

I actually signed up for this website in the aughts, before it was purchased by Amazon. I was just out of my teens and had no followers. None of my friends used this website. At first I didn't even write any reviews, I just stalked what other people wrote and quietly shelved and rated my books for my own records. Eventually I started writing reviews of my own and started making friends with people. I'm STILL friends with some of those people I met in those early years and that is very awesome and exciting and makes me happy. I truly feel so much gratitude for some of the relationships and friendships I have built through this site.

When you don't really have much of a following, I think it's easy not to see the consequences of your actions because there isn't really a ripple effect. In a way, it feels deceptively freeing, because you basically exist in your own little privileged echo chamber. But that feeling of ignorance can also cushion you from understanding your privilege and the potential for harm that badly worded reviews can have. It wasn't until after my follow count started growing that I began to really critically think about things like using inclusive and unbiased language, or not sounding totally hateful when writing a review for a book that really made me angry, or the importance of reading and supporting authors who are marginalized even--especially-- if seeking them out might take effort on my part. A quick Google search or browsing through Goodreads's Listopia feature can yield all kinds of crowd-sourced curation on all kinds of marginalized authors and content creators.

As my follow count continues to grow, I sometimes find myself thinking more about how my words will be perceived than how I felt about whatever I'm writing about. And while I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, because people with privilege should think about how they wield that privilege and how it can affect others and also how they can potentially use it to elevate those who have less or none, I do sometimes find myself feeling pretty bewildered and exhausted by how I got to this current place. Since books are so intensely personal, people looking at your virtual shelves or book reviews sometimes feel like they know you (I have another essay planned about this subject as well), and that sense of familiarity can cause people to feel entitled to make blanket statements about who you are and what you stand for-- which are oftentimes incorrect. I'm not talking about genuinely problematic behavior that deserves to be called out (or in), either, but sentiments like, "You must be a bad person if you didn't like this book" or "Only someone totally stupid would think this or that." And honestly? Unless whatever they're saying is truly harmful, 99% of the time, it's not worth the trouble to refute it. Part of the reason I turned my comments off was because I just got so tired of devoting my mental energy to people who wanted to come into my comments section to insult me. I'm just trying to live my life, my dudes. Just like you.

People often ask me how I got to my follow count and I can usually tell them honestly that part of it was trying to be authentic and honest while also actively making an effort not to be a dick, but the rest of it is luck-- and, yes, privilege. I actually deleted all of the reviews I wrote from when I was in my teens/early twenties because I felt like they didn't really represent who I was as a person anymore, and a lot of them read as very angry and negative. One of my biggest regrets on this site is for all the times I allowed even a little of that to seep into how I interacted with some people on here. It's not an excuse but an acknowledgement that I'm not perfect and I'm always trying to do better. More visibility made me really think about the net effects of my actions as a content creator; it's caused me to read more diversely and to try to behave more compassionately. It's also taught me that it's okay to step back when I don't have the cognitive bandwidth to deal with people anymore online, and that deleting a review can sometimes say even more than writing it did in the first place.

But sometimes, when I look at my numbers, it really does freak me out. It often doesn't feel real, and when I think about it too hard, I feel unworthy or undeserving. Because even though I work hard on my reviews, so do a lot of other people-- people who might work twice as hard and have half or fewer people looking at what they write-- and I understand that a lot of what I have now is because I was lucky. I'm grateful for that, but having that knowledge does sometimes make me feel like a fraud. At the end of the day, all I can do is try to be the best person I can be, support other creators, and remember why I joined this site in the first place: because I was so fucking bored in my college stats class and wanted to connect with other readers.