I can’t believe it, but this blog, Broke by Books, is ten years old last month! I started this book blog as a space to host a project for my Young Adult Services course in my first semester of library grad school. It has since grown into a site about all things bookish. More than a million people have viewed this blog! I have published over 200 articles, but for this special anniversary, I’m highlighting my 10 favorite posts over the last 10 years.
Here are my favorite posts from the (first!) ten years here at Broke by Books.
(1) The Post That Started It All: “A LITTLE SOMETHING DIFFERENT by Sandy Hall | Book Review” – November 15, 2014
This was the first post I ever published on Broke by Books. For my first semester in library school at Clarion University (now PennWest Clarion), I took a course in Young Adult Services and Literature. We had to keep a record of each of the 40 books we read. I chose to house them on a book blog that I’d been conceptualizing for the better part of the year. I had the name picked out: “Broke by Books.” It was simple, percussive, and a little bit cheeky.
And so the blog was born!
This review of A Little Something Different was the spark that lit a fire under me. I loved that Broke by Books was a book entirely on my terms. I could write whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. It seemed like the perfect fit for me, whose greatest passion was reading (and, as I’d soon find out, writing).
The main reason I went to library school was because I wanted to be able to recommend books professionally. Years later, I would get that opportunity. But Broke by Books was my first platform where I could recommend books via my writing. And this post was the one that started it all.
(2) The Post That Launched my Freelance Writing Career – “YA Novels about Disability and Illness: Some History and a Forecast for 2015” – June 3, 2015
Not long after I started Broke by Books, I felt the desire to expand my writing about books. It was fun to have my book blog, but I wanted to broaden my skills and find a new audience. I researched a few online websites to write for and even applied for a few. First among them was Book Riot. I was initially rejected when I applied in the winter of 2015. Admittedly, the articles from here that I submitted were some of my earliest, least polished posts. Then I realized I could re-apply, so I did later in the year with this post about disability representation in young adult fiction.
I was and am proud of this post for blending two of my biggest interests—disability rep and kid lit—and, even though it’s kind of wince-worthy to look back at how much of a beginning writer I was back then, this post helped me establish what I wanted to write about. And not only write about other people’s YA books, but write about these topics myself in my own YA fiction I was starting to experiment with. In the end, I was approved to write for Book Riot on my re-application and would go on to write more than 100 articles from 2015 to 2023. You can see the full archive of my Book Riot articles here.
(3) The Post That Inspired my Passive Income Journey – “An Epic List of 52 Book Blogging Ideas: From Cookbooks to Confessions” – January 29, 2016
Ever since I first learned about passive income in 2013 when I discovered Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Work Week, I knew I wanted to put a lot of effort into building a passive income career myself. It wasn’t so much about “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich” as Ferriss chooses as his subtitle; it’s that I realized I needed to shift to an income situation that matched my work situation. My health challenges were only getting worse. I needed to invest time and energy into front loading my my efforts into passive income that would earn money for me when I was too sick to work.
When I wrote this post, which was an “epic list” of 52 post ideas for book bloggers, I didn’t expect it to take off, and yet it did! This was one of the first posts on this blog to really go viral (in a small way) and bring me more traffic. More than that, it established me as a book blogger who wanted to write about book blogging and help other book bloggers.
I took this post and built on it until I created a list of 365 book blogging ideas. I decided to compile this truly epic list into a book in its own right. I expanded the list and included some chapters about book blogging and published it in June 2018 as Book Blogging Hacks.
You can buy it now!
Even though this book hasn’t earned a full-time income and I can’t “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich,” I am proud of myself for putting my efforts into passive income, and this book received many positive reviews on Amazon and Goodreads that made me happy I’d helped some book bloggers in some small way. Book blogging has definitely changed since 2018, but I do hope Book Blogging Hacks will still help newbie book bloggers with some of the more evergreen and timeless advice. After launching my passive income efforts, I would later go on to publish six other nonfiction books. This was the start of that journey.
Similarly, I also saw another post take off, my children’s literature quiz I published in 2019, especially during the pandemic when teachers were searching for online resources for kids. This success prompted me to expand that idea and create a whole book of literature trivia, The Great Literature Trivia Quiz Book, which you can buy on Amazon now.
(4) The Post I Wish I Had When I Started Library Graduate School – “10 Pieces of Advice for New Library Science Graduate Students“ – September 21, 2017
I started library graduate school at Clarion University in August 2014. After a few rocky years, I finally graduated in spring 2017. It was not an easy degree, and I wasn’t very prepared based on my undergraduate experience. I made many mistakes along the way. This article, in which I give 10 pieces of advice for new students who are embarking on library school, was built out of those rookie mistakes. And, based on the data on external link clicks related to that post, library school students were finding it helpful.
But the tip I’m happiest that I included was #9: “Develop a Plan B. Now.” I say this because I started library school thinking I’d be working full time at the library where I was interning or another one by the time I graduated Clarion. Unfortunately, my mental illness challenges had other ideas. I needed to come up with a Plan B. In the end, I did: I leaned into my reader’s advisory skills and built a career out of writing about and recommending books as a “freelance librarian.” I’m glad I was able to salvage my library school education and still manage to gain some library experience along the way by interning, volunteering, library related gig work, etc. But, given how cut throat and competitive the field of library and information science can be right now, I think it’s important for all library science grad students to have an alternate plan in case LIS doesn’t work out for them. (If this is you, check out my list on Book Riot about 50+ alternative career ideas for librarians.)
(5) The Post about the Best Decision I Ever Made – “A Recap of My First Residency in the VCFA Writing for Children and Young Adults MFA“ – August 20, 2018
I knew my whole life that I wanted to be an author and write books. I figured that out way back when I was in elementary school and read Harriet the Spy. I loved this story about a writer and knew I wanted to be one, too.
But it took me an awful long time to really commit to chasing that dream. I made academic choices over the years that brought me closer and closer to focusing on achieving my goal of being a writer until 2017.
Let’s start back in college. In undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, I majored in English, but I transferred and didn’t have enough time to take extra electives outside the core requirements for the major and the college’s distribution credits. Still, the ones I took confirmed my dream of pursuing writing.
After graduating, I looked into MFA programs in Creative Nonfiction but ultimately didn’t go through with applying. Over the next few years after college, I took some courses, including at Penn’s Master of Bioethics program. I kept circling around my true goal—to write—without giving into it. I applied to library school in the summer of 2014 because I wanted to work in libraries and, specifically, recommend books, as mentioned above.
During the course of my MLIS program, though, I finally figured out that what I really, really, really wanted to do was enroll in an MFA program and give myself the chance to see if writing was the right career for me. I had taken an online workshop with Heather Demetrios after I read her YA contemporary romance novel I’ll Meet You There and was shattered by it in the best way. That workshop helped me circle in on what kind of MFA program I wanted to do. It was simple: I wanted to write books as powerful as Heather’s I’ll Meet You There, and she was a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts’ Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adult (hereafter referred to in this post as “VCFA” and “WCYA”). I explored VCFA’s WCYA program and knew it was the perfect match. I loved YA and wanted to write it. I could study it there with some of the leading YA and kid lit authors writing today. I secretly applied to WCYA in the spring of 2017 during my last semester at Clarion. When I got the call that I was accepted, I was beyond joyful. Unfortunately, leading up to my start in the program in January 2018, I was struggling with illness. I had to defer and started in July 2018.
The title that introduces this post is “The Post about the Best Decision I Ever Made” because that’s what that first residency was for me. I returned on the nine hour trip Amtrak train from Montpelier, Vermont, to Philadelphia, PA in tears. My life had radically changed. I was finally dedicating myself to writing, and the program hit me in the feels because I didn’t realize how much children’s and young adult literature has meant to me over my life, in fact even saving my life, I’d say.
In this post, I recapped my first residency at VCFA. Over the years, this article ranked in the top 10 on Google if you were searching for VCFA WCYA, which made me encouraged because I hoped it would reach new students or potential applicants. And I know that, in fact, it did! At one of my later residencies, a new student told me that she recognized me from social media and had read this residency recap. This was definitely a surreal moment! But one that made me very happy. A few years later, a potential applicant also reached out to me about WCYA. It was easy for me to talk up the program, and she eventually applied and enrolled.
If you’re interested in reading more about my time at VCFA, check out my recaps of Semester 1, Semester 2, and Semester 3.
(6) The Post Where I Nerd Out about My Passion for Reader’s Advisory – “How to Recommend Books: A Crash Course in Reader’s Advisory” – April 10, 2019
As I mentioned earlier, the reason why I wanted to go into librarianship was because I was obsessed with books, specifically recommending books. After I graduated college in 2011, I was just starting to explore reading as an adult first, not as a student first. I could pick and choose whatever I wanted to read, not pay attention to a syllabus or a curriculum. Over those years, I wasn’t very happy with my day-to-day life, and books were the ultimate escape.
Reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, maybe the best book I’d ever read as an adult, in the spring of 2014 made me realize I wanted to recommend books to other people. I loved The Goldfinch and wanted to recommend it to everyone I knew, so I applied to library grad school at Clarion because I knew this was a part of library science, and I wanted to study it. But I didn’t know at that time that there was a name for this: “reader’s advisory.”
After I started this blog in the fall of 2014 during my first semester at Clarion fully intending to write up my book recommendations somewhere online, I took a reader’s advisory elective and was hooked.
The best part? I could do reader’s advisory on a freelance, disability friendly basis. I started writing for EBSCO’s NoveList, a reader’s advisory database and tool for librarians.
My reader’s advisory dreams became even more fulfilled when I started working as a “Bibliologist” at Book Riot’s Tailored Book Recommendations Service (TBR) in July 2018. Over the past six years, I have completed more than 2,000 orders. Each order requires I recommend three books. That means I’ve recommended over 6,000 books!
And along the way, I learned a thing or two about reader’s advisory. I shared these tips in this post about tips for recommending books. I am proud of this list because I think it goes a bit beyond some of the library world’s understanding of reader’s advisory. Personally, I think RA needs to be rethought and rebuilt from the ground up. (And shh… I’m working on a top secret project for doing just that right now!) I hope these tips help not only librarians with RA, but book bloggers or anyone who wants to recommend books.
(7) The Post That’s Been the Most Popular – “The Word Count of 175 Favorite Novels“ – May 11, 2019
From 2018-2023, I was very focused on writing evergreen articles that were “listicles” compiling the best books in various topics here on Broke by Books. My goal was to harness the powers of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and write articles that would rank high in search results.
(Of course, I was focused most on creating the best articles that people were looking for already, but SEO definitely impacted my content strategy!)
I would spend hours and hours on these list posts. And many of them did indeed perform well on Google. I know I was front-loading the effort strategizing that I would bring in affiliate income through those high-performing posts. And, since I was seeing that strategy was working, I kept going until Google radically changed SEO forever in the winter of 2023 and shrunk my visits from a peak of 50,000 views a month in January 2023 to barely 6,000 a month here at the end of 2024. That slashed my affiliate income from this blog. But that’s another story.
This post, which compiles the word count of more than 175 books, took forever to write. Not only did it include a ton of research, it required a lot of custom graphics and special formatting. I even created a Google Sheet people could view to find citations for the word counts I listed.
This post doesn’t (and hasn’t ever, really) brought in a ton of affiliate clicks, but it has routinely brought in the most traffic of all my posts ever. Since this post was first published in May 2019, it’s been viewed more than 220,000 times, by far my most popular post. That makes me happy because it’s helping readers or writers or whoever determine the word count of some of the most popular books of all time. This post has also seen a lot of backlinks, with people linking to the article on Reddit or wherever. People also routinely post the link on social media, as on X.
The point is, this post told me I was on the right track of writing labor intensive articles that were genuinely helpful to people. Now that we are living in the new world after Google changed SEO, I’m still working on what my new content strategy and how I can write articles that are still helpful for people. But this post is a reminder that playing the “long game” and making content that is genuinely helpful for people and answering the questions they’re searching for is the best strategy at all, in this new post-SEO world and beyond.
(8) The Post That Helps You Learn from My Mistakes – “5 Mistakes I’ve Made as a Book Blogger” – December 15, 2021
Over the last 10 years, I’ve made many mistakes as a book blogger, and this post collects five of the biggest ones. Across the past decade, I’ve learned from experiences, especially negative ones, and this article will hopefully save time, energy, and money for newbie book bloggers.
In this post, I talk about the errors I’ve made, both forced and unforced, on a range of topics, from decisions I made about tech to misguided attempts to promote Broke by Books on more social media platforms than I could possibly keep up with. I consider this post to be the second part of the article I wrote (and linked to above) about my tips for book bloggers. If you’re an aspiring book blogger and you happen to find this post, I hope you can learn from the blogging mistakes I share in this article.
(9) The Post about the Person Who Shaped My Love for Books the Most – “The English Teacher’s Daughter” – March 5, 2021
My father passed away in February 2021. He was undoubtedly the person who influenced me the most as a reader. My dad was a high school English teacher for 40 years. He was a legend in my school district. He had a special power to make English fun, not just for honors and AP students, but for students who weren’t in the most elite courses. My dad gave these students a haven (literally, our high school is named “Strath Haven High School”) and created a safe space where you could just have fun and enjoy the joys of literature.
This essay was one I originally wrote for Book Riot for Father’s Day in 2016. The essay is about how my father shaped my identity as a reader and a writer. When I got to high school, he had just retired, and I struggled to shape my own self as a reader and writer outside his shadow. It’s hard to understate just how influential he was in our community. Even though we both loved writing and literature, our relationship was icy until I got to college. Unlike my brother, who teaches middle school English, I chose not to pursue teaching secondary school (I’m still hoping to teach creative writing at the college level). But he no doubt encouraged my earliest love for reading books and writing my own stories.
My father earned his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, the school I would later attend and love just as much as he did. This has given me my drive and ambition to one day pursue a doctorate degree myself. Even after he retired, my father was an intellectual. He would read The New York Review of Books—which I suspect not many other people do—as well as other highbrow magazines and journals and write sonnets. He was a lover of poetry, writing, and literature.
After my father passed away, I knew I wanted to read this at his funeral. I revisited the essay and revised it. This post is the version I read at his funeral. I’m proud of it because it took me so long in my life to reckon with my father’s influence, and this essay is my best effort to sort through that personal history. I think this speaks to the legend he was and how I—and my sister and other brothers—remember him best, as a champion of literature.
(10) The Post That I Hope Sparks What Happens Next – “Four Romance Writing Tips from TITANIC” – November 3, 2023
This post includes four craft observations I’ve distilled from one of my favorite movies of all time, Titanic. I nerd out about everything from internal/external conflict to the objective correlative. It is the sum of my craft knowledge I learned at VCFA and the crafty education I have tried to develop myself since graduating in 2021.
I also built on my experience in romance world. I’ve actually had a crash course in writing romance over the last 9 years. It started in 2015 when I became a copywriter at Kirkus Media. I penned taglines and book descriptions for a variety of genres that the publisher we worked with released, including lots and lots of romance, from small-town romance to my specialty, paranormal romance. Later, I became a production editor at Kirkus and edited countless other copywriter’s romance tags and blurbs. A few years after that, I became a freelance writer of plots for romance novels that other writers would ghostwrite on Upwork. The beats of a romance novel—and what makes a good romance good—were drilled into me.
Even though I graduated with an MFA in kid lit, I am still in love with writing romance. I draw on the skills I learned in my MFA program and adapt them to the adult romance novels I write now (as well as YA romances I’m also working on).
This post is the culmination of my craft knowledge gained from my MFA years as well as my practical experience in romance world.
Ultimately, I hope to write more posts like this one where I geek out about writing craft. Working as the social media manager and editorial assistant for KidLit Craft has helped me identify further that I want to work in a role where I help other writers grow through craft. Now when I apply to editing gigs, I link to this article to show my crafty knowledge.
I labeled this posts as “The Post That I Hope Sparks What Happens Next” because I want to do more of this in the future, analyzing craft and writing romance stories told well, not just here on my blog but in an actual classroom.
My dream is to teach creative writing at the college level, with a more narrow dream of going back to Penn’s English Department and teaching creative writing there.
I’ve already started drafting a hypothetical course in my head, and part of it would include analyzing movies like Titanic for craft takeaways.
I also want to write great romances and other books that make people feel something: hope, happiness, escape, joy… I can only hope that I can achieve that one day and give people the experience I have had all my life with literature, experiences that have shaped who I am as a reader and writer.
Piecing it all together… what was once the past is now the future…
Looking back at this collection of my 10 favorite posts from 10 years with Broke by Books, I see how the last post I highlighted book-ends the very first one I ever published here on Broke by Books, the review of A Little Something Different.
That was a review of a YA romance I read during my first semester of library school. Since then, I’ve graduated with two master degrees, self-published seven nonfiction (and one fiction, Finding My Voice, under the pen name Minerva Snow), and posted more than 200 posts here.
Everything has come full circle: I reviewed a YA romance novel, and now I write them and hope to teach other writers the craft of writing great stories. This blog has been a record of my growth as a reader and writer and a lover of book as well as my experience with debilitating mental health issues that radically spun my compass. It’s been a personal journey, one I’ve had the privilege to share with your, my dear readers.
Thank you to everyone who has ever read a post or shared one or liked one or engaged in any way.
So what happens next?
I can’t wait to figure that out!
Just for fun before we go…
I’ll close this post with a few screenshots of Broke by Books through the years, courtesy of The Internet Archive.
Here’s Broke by Books in 2015…
in 2016…
in 2017…
in 2019…
in 2020…
And finally today, in 2024…
Thanks for reading! Here’s to another 10 years of bookish blogging!
