Woaaah, We’re Halfway There! Goals Update

Way back when (aka six months ago) we made a post talking about our bookish goals for the wonderful year of our lord, 2019. Now that we are halfway through the year, we’ve decided that it may be a good time to look back, reflect on the goals we set, and laugh about how badly we’re keeping up with them. 

General Blogging Goals

Our first blogging goal was to post at least once a month, once a week on good days. And I’m proud to say that we are KILLING IT! After slowly tapering off in November from 3 posts to 2 posts in October, to our lonesome 2018 wrap up in December, we revived the blog in January with 4 posts! But once we started making monthly schedules, we really became prolific! We now post every 2 or 3 days, and even during our busy month of finals in May we managed to put out 13 posts! I’d say we’re definitely on track with this one!

Us putting out new posts each week

We also discussed linking up for the Discussion Challenge! We didn’t set ourselves a particular level, but considering we post at least 3 or 4 discussions most months, I’d say we’re excelling! I’d like to say we’re reaching for Gift of the Gab at this point, which means we’d like to have more than 41 discussion posts by the end of the year.

Something else we spoke about in our goals post was Bookstagram. We went on a little bit of a hiatus towards the end of 2018, so we really wanted to try and revive our Insta, and keep it going at least a little bit. I’m really proud to say that we’ve been keeping up with that goal as well! We’ve begun posting at least 3 times every week, which I know isn’t a lot by many Bookstagram standards, but it works well enough for us. We’ve also had some amazing opportunities so far this year, having repped for both Uppercase book box and the June NOVLbox. We also are still reps for withabooksleeve and just got informed that people have actually used our rep code (PAPER10) which seems a bit crazy!

Malka showing off her two newest loves, book sleeves and Red, White, & Royal Blue

Personal Goals:

Chana:

One of my personal goals for 2019, was that I wanted to start writing more reviews. And thanks to a bit of unexpected luck with NetGalley, I feel like I’m meeting that goal! So far this year, I’ve written a total of 9 reviews, which in retrospect doesn’t seem like that much, but over the last half of last year, I wrote about four and half reviews, so I think that this is a considerable improvement.

Me, being super proud of my 9 measly reviews

Reading wise, I put down that I would like to read 200 books this year, and so far I’m pretty on track with that! To be completely honest, my reading has slowed down considerably in the past two months, but I’m currently at 127 books read so I’ll probably be ok?

Malka:

I mentioned wanting to focus more on discussion and tags which I kind of succeeded at. We’ve definitely been doing more tags, and we have quite a few in the works of getting answered. (Thank you to everyone who tags us. We love you all even if we’re super behind!) But I don’t know If I’m focusing more on discussions, because I already was super focused on them!

The other piece I mentioned was about how I wasn’t enjoying reviewing. I now have a whole post about my stuggle with reviewing and I did kinda change it up when I wrote this post that was a hybrid of a Kiss Quotient review and a general romance recommendation post. I’d say I’m doing okay at my personal goals, but I’d like to do more hybrid posts in the future!

Malka congratulating herself on doing the bare minimum

Reading wise, I said that I set my Goodreads goal at 30, but would change it to 50 if things went well. And I’m happy to say that my Goodreads goal is now at 80 since I’ve already read 67 books this year. I still hope to get to 100 books this year, and I should be able to get there. But I definitely met my halfway goal!

My other two goals were to get my NetGalley ratio to 90% and to read my 2017 and 2018 BookCon books. I think I’m proudest of the progress I made with these two because they were definitely the most challenging! I read 3 of my backlist titles on NetGalley, and that combined with keeping up to date on my current titles allowed me to see the coveted 91% on my dashboard! It went down a bit now because I got approved for another book, but my goal is to review enough books that if I get approved for one more book, I still have a 90% ratio.

As for my BookCon books, out of the 12 unread books I started with in December/January, I have read 7 and I’m in the middle of the 8th. I don’t think I’ll finish all of them anymore, but I would like to have finished 10/12 by the end of 2019.

Our last goal was a general hope that we’d connect with other bloggers and bookstagrammers! And from Malka’s first ever buddy read with Ellyn @ Allonsythornraxx this month, to meeting bookstagrammers we follow in person, I’d say we’re doing okay in that area too!

We can’t believe we’re doing so well on the goals we set for ourselves! I guess it helps when you set achievable and reasonable goals. Aim low!

We’ve had such a wonderful first half of the year, and we can’t wait to see what the rest of 2019 brings!

What are some bookish goals that you’ve been on top of so far this year? Are there any goals you have that you want to try to be better at?