Ten Years of The Gothic Library!

Can you believe I’ve been blogging for a full decade? This Thursday, June 5, will mark the tenth anniversary of when I first launched The Gothic Library. For eight and a half years, I blogged every single week, with some extra posts at the beginning to juice the engine. In 2024, I switched to posting every other week. Over the last ten years, I have written 511 posts. That’s a total of 415k words, all about my love of books. 

So much has changed since I first started this blog, fresh out of college in 2015. First of all, it’s no longer quite the Era of the Blog. Book blogs are growing rarer and rarer as most book recommenders move to the social media site du jour, such as Instagram and TikTok. However, the long-form written word will always remain my preferred medium. I still maintain a Facebook page to link my blog posts, but I have abandoned my Twitter account. I did join BlueSky during the great Twitter migration and I share my blog posts from my personal account there.

The role this blog plays in my life has also changed a lot over the last decade. I first started The Gothic Library when I was still dreaming of a career in publishing. I used the blog as a way to stay on top of fresh releases and new voices or genre trends. It also served as a great excuse to show up at book events and network and as a conversation starter with authors and publishing professionals I admired. When I initially had editorial ambitions, evaluating books through this blog helped to sharpen my editorial eye. Then after years of receiving pitch emails from publicists in my inbox, I came around to the idea of working in publicity, where I find myself now. Ironically, now that I have achieved that career in publishing, I have much less time and energy for the blog that helped me get here. But it still serves an important purpose: Continuing to blog ensures that I take time to read for pleasure and to read outside of the genres that I now work in. During stressful periods at work, it helps me remember what I loved about books in the first place. 

Lastly, I’ve changed a lot as a reader in the last ten years. When I first started The Gothic Library, the blog’s title was somewhat aspirational. I knew very little about the genre apart from the few core texts I’d read in high school and a cursory introduction to the literary movement in college. Over time, I read as many classic works of Gothic literature as I could, studied the genre’s history, and refined my understanding of how to define it. The Romancing the Gothic community has been a huge help along the way, with their informative lectures and enlightening book clubs and reading challenges. There is still much to learn, of course, and many classic works of Gothic literature I have yet to read—which is why I have no intention of quitting this blog anytime soon. 

I had planned to take this moment to reflect on some of my most popular and engaged-with blog posts, as I did in my five-year anniversary post. But WordPress now wants to make me pay extra to see those stats (enshittification of technology is another trend that’s only grown over the last ten years…). So instead, I’ll highlight my favorite post of all time: “Gothic Tropes: The Cursed Wanderer.” I really enjoy my Gothic Tropes series in general, even though they are some of my most research-heavy and laborious to write. This trope in particular is one that took me a while to wrap my head around, but once I did, I started seeing it everywhere. It weaves together some of my favorite elements of Gothic literature—like vampires—as well as some of this genre’s ugliest parts—like antisemitism. I’m particularly proud of how this piece came out and I hope I can do similar justice to more complicated genre tropes like this one in the future.

What’s been particularly interesting about blogging on one subject for ten years is that people have started treating me like an authority on Gothic literature, even though I rarely feel like one myself. I’ve been asked to give lectures at conventions and be a guest on podcasts. But recently I was invited to partake in a new honor: blurbing a book! Kensington Books asked me if I would give some words of praise for America’s Most Gothic: Haunted History Stranger Than Fiction by Leanna Renee Hieber and Andrea Janes. So keep an eye out for my words on the back cover of this book when it comes out on September 30 (preorder now)! It feels particularly fitting to be giving a blurb for the very first author I reviewed on this blog way back in June 2015, and who has supported me and this blog in all of the years since!

So, after a decade, what’s next? Well, I intend to continue blogging for as long as it remains fun and my ancient WordPress website remains usable. Though I may not have quite as much time and energy to dedicate to it as I did ten years ago, I hope I make up for it with what I’ve gained in experience and expertise. I hope you’ll join me for whatever the rest of my blogging journey has in store. Let me know in the comments how long you’ve been following this blog, and if there’s anything in particular you’d like to see more of in the future!