Random Ramble: Blogging vs. BookTube (Rachel)

I recently started a BookTube channel. Well, I guess it's not so recent, is it? I've been making videos on my evilclementine channel since June of 2013. That's almost a year! Man, the time flies.

Anyway, so I guess I've been doing the video thing for longer than I thought. Of course, this blog has been around for about two and a half years now, so I've definitely been doing the blogging thing longer. Today I want to compare the two different formats and talk about the advantages and disadvantages of each.

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Let's start with blogging. Listen, blogging is my favorite. This blog is my (well, and Megan's :P) baby, conceived in our freshman year of high school when we had no idea what we were doing. I've been blogging for what feels like forever, and I absolutely love it. I'm a writer, so I like being able to share my thoughts in writing. Words come easier to me when I'm writing them down than when I'm actually saying them, so I appreciate the fact that I can think about what I'm going to say and put a lot of time and energy into my blog posts, instead of rushing to get all the words out in one recording session, like I have to do with my YouTube channel.

However, there are some disadvantages of blogging. I think the biggest one is that it's such an over-saturated community. There are SO MANY book blogs out there in the blogosphere, and so many of those blogs are fabulous! So why is this a bad thing? Well, it makes it more difficult for one blog to get noticed, and emerge from the outskirts of the blogosphere to stand in the spotlight. Now, I'm not too concerned about being in the spotlight. I have no desire to be one of those huge, insanely popular bloggers. For the most part, I'm totally fine with our relatively small blog. But sometimes, I wish it wasn't so difficult to gain readers/friends. I don't want to use the word "followers," because that's not what this blog is really about. I don't want people reading our posts; I want people responding to them so that we can have conversations and become friends. But I still have a hard time getting the blog "out there" and finding new people to connect with.

Another issue that has crept up with blogging is the totally confusing way to follow blogs. We have people following us through GFC (which I thought was supposed to go away...?), Bloglovin', email, twitter, and who knows what else. This makes it hard to see the "big picture," and at any given time, I really have no idea what our readership is like because there's no way to calculate it. This isn't a huge deal, because I honestly don't care much about the numbers, but it would be nice to have a better idea than I do now.

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Now, let's move on to BookTube. My experience with BookTube has been incredibly positive so far. Unlike blogging, BookTube is still a somewhat new thing. There aren't as many BookTubers as there are bloggers, so it's a bit easier to find people within the community without being totally overwhelmed by the sheer number of people. This also means that my YouTube channel is already more popular than this blog is, though I've been blogging for much longer. With the YouTube algorithm in place, my videos pop up in the "related videos" section frequently, so it's easy for people to hop on over to my channel and click the subscribe button. I've been gaining subscribers steadily, while the blog only has little spurts of new activity at specific times.

Another thing I like about BookTube is that I feel more connected to my fellow BookTubers. Filming tag videos and discussion videos encourages people to talk to each other, and I believe that matching a face and voice to the words is a huge plus. It makes me feel like I know the YouTubers a lot better than the bloggers, who can be like anonymous enigmas to me at times. BookTube makes it easier to get your personality across, since it's in the form of videos.

But there are several things I don't like about BookTube. First of all, I'm a much better writer than I am speaker. Writing reviews comes naturally to me, while I end up stumbling and stuttering my way through my videos. Also, BookTube takes a lot more time. I have to film a video, edit it, and upload it, which is a longer process than I thought it would be, and definitely a longer process than blogging is. The editing especially can be extremely frustrating, and if I'm not happy with the content I filmed, it's not like I can go back and fix it, like I would with a mistake in a blog post.

Clearly, there are advantages and disadvantages to both blogging and BookTubing. For now, I enjoy both of them enough to continue on with them, although maybe in the future I'll just stick to one. Balancing the blog and the YouTube channel is not always easy, and sometimes I end up with several videos in a week on my channel but no blog posts, so I'm not the best at managing both at the same time. But I'm getting better, I think, and I like that I can pick and choose which way I want to share whatever information I want to share. If I want to review a book in a more professional, sophisticated manner, I pick the blog post. (I mean, it's a little more professional and sophisticated...I do still write "rambles" instead of reviews :P) If I want to flail around and show people just how excited I am, I pick the video.

What do you guys think? Do you think there are more advantages to blogging or BookTubing? Do you do one or both? Would you ever consider doing both? Let me know your thoughts down in the comments so we can discuss!