As many of you will know I very much enjoy Bookstagram, for me it's just a bit of fun, or so I thought. When I started out it was something new and exciting, something that I was doing just for me, but of course a couple of months down the line it has started to evolve into something I'm quite protective about. Now I'm the kind of person who's feelings are easily hurt, I do take things personally even though I know I shouldn't and especially over something as arbitrary as Instagram. This week saw a milestone for me on my bookstagram, I reached 100 followers! When I started I didn't think I would be concerned with such things, but I felt proud of this achievement and I posted on my IG and my facebook blog page about it. When I woke up the next morning I was down to 98. Obviously my joy was mistaken for smugness and I lost 2 followers because of it. The next day I went to Harry Potter studio for my daughters birthday and we got a lot of stuff (and a large chunk of my pay packet was sunk in the gift shop) which we then displayed with her books. I took a #shelfie and posted it on IG. Now usually Harry Potter is a winner on IG, tons of people will like a Harry Potter post, not so much my followers it seems as I lost another 3 followers overnight - I mean you can see from the picture the horror of it all and why people would want to banish me from their feed ;)
And so began this game of follow and unfollow, if it hadn't been for this milestone marker I wouldn't have really noticed but I have seen my follows pick up and drop of almost hourly (in fact I have lost another whilst I have been typing this.)
So what makes you want to unfollow an IG account? I have 2, one for my kiddies and cats and one for books which is linked to this blog. I like to keep my blog one bookish, so if I follow someone and they are posting personal pics more often than books then I will unfollow, it's not personal, I just don't know them and I don't feel comfortable being shown their lives, but other than that I pretty much keep everyone. My book posts are on point, usually linked to a book challenge or something that has a large fandom following like HP or ACOTAR, so I'm not sure what i'm doing to upset people enough to follow my profile link through to unfollow. My fun thing just for me, has become unfun and that makes me sad. I'm a grown up and I realise that people can be fickle, I think a large proportion of bookstagrammers (or at least the ones I'm following) are teenagers or in their early 20's (a downside to my love of YA above all else) and are likely to be this way - I have 2 children and I know firsthand how one thing that was a favourite one day will be consigned to the back of the cupboard the next. I'm still trying to understand it and maybe I shouldn't, perhaps I just need to let it be fun again and to do that I'm going to need to stay away from the page that shows me my follows for a while! I've not done an IG post today, I will start again fresh tomorrow hopefully with a better insight not to take things so personally and get back to doing it mainly just for me :)
