I recently read a great roundtable interview on Ancillary Review of Books about the nature of being a paid reviewer, and how professional book critics are faring in today’s reviewing climate. If you haven’t read it already, it’s an interesting read that I suggest checking out. Now, I’m not going to be talking about that article specifically, but my thoughts today are adjacent to and inspired by it.
To be clear on two points: 1) I think professional book reviewers are an important part of the book community. 2) I am not a professional book reviewer, and do not have any current plans to become one.
I am a hobbyist book blogger, but I am very enthusiastic about my hobby. Crucially, I am happy to invest money into my hobby. Because I am not professional review, I do not get paid to review. As a hobbyist, it’s literally the opposite. I have to buy books in order to review them. And that’s not the only cost of being a book blogger.
Which brings me to my point today. If you want to get into book blogging, how much money are you going to need? Take all this with a pinch of salt, because it’s based purely on one man’s experience, but here we go.
The Blog
Okay, so first off you’re going to want somewhere to talk about books. Social media is all well and good, but if you want something more dedicated, a blog is the way to go. Why? Because podcasting equipment or video recording setup costs money. You can blog for free, if you’re willing to have ads. I’m not happy with ads, so I pay a cool £5 a month to be ad-free. So let’s call that £5 our starting point.
Books
Right, the key part of talking about books is, of course, books. How many books you talk about is naturally limited to how many books you actually read. In these days of competitive reading and monthly targets (ew), it’s easy to forget that most people don’t feel the need to read all day every day to keep up with some imaginary target. There are plenty of studies to show that someone reading a book a month are reading well above the average. Basing our numbers on myself, I would consider ten books a month to be a great reading level, and plenty of material for discussion on a blog.
But how much do these books cost? The answer is variable. A brand new hardback might cost you £25. You might get lucky and be given books for free. A new paperback could be around £10, but at a charity shop you can get them for £1. For convenience’s sake, let’s say that in a month, you buy one new hardback and one new paperback, and the rest are decent charity shop finds for £2 a piece. That gives us a monthly book budget of £51
Subscriptions
If you want books, you might also be into audiobooks. An Audible subscription is around £8 a month. If you want to talk about books getting adapted to the small screen, or other nerdy goodness, then most streaming services are somewhere around the £10 mark. Let’s say you get one a month to binge a series. Add in audiobooks and that’s an extra £18.
In Summary
So, if you add all of that together and you get £74 a month. That adds up to a healthy £888 a year. If you’re buying more books, especially new books, you could well be staring at £1000 a year for the pleasure running a book blog. That is, safe to say, quite a sizable chunk of cash. I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to invest that kind of cash in an occasionally thankless hobby. But for me, I’d say it’s viable. There are certainly more expensive hobbies out there, just ask anyone who plays table-top wargames. So if you’re looking at getting into book blogging, I say give it a go.
At Boundary's Edge 