Last Friday, for the first time in about 15 years, I just didn’t bother to write a blog post. Friday came and went and I didn’t post an apology for not writing anything or worry about whether or not anybody would notice that it wasn’t there. I just didn’t do it.

I’ve been threatening to cut down on my blogging for a while, but this is the first time I’ve just followed through. Not a big dramatic statement – just the absence of some words.

What’s changed?

I think the whole business of engaging with people online has become increasingly difficult. It seems to involve more work and few obvious benefits. I don’t think it’s me or you, dear reader. I think the whole ecosystem that has supported online communication has rather curled up and died.

The most obvious example is Twitter. For all its occasional rancid unpleasantness (usually quite easy to avoid by liberal use of the block button) it was a lively place, with lots of interesting chat. Now the chat is lost, submerged in a flood of nubile young women who apparently just want to be my friend, political propaganda that owes rather too much to Dr Goebbels, and endless advertisements for crypto-currency. Many of the people I used to enjoy exchanging ideas with have fled the platform. Those who remain engage less often with anything I might say, presumably because they, like me, find it difficult to spot the stuff we might be interested in amongst the dross.

Some refugees from Twitter have gone to Bluesky and some to Threads. I’m on both of these platforms but I find it difficult to engage with people there. Threads, in particular, is endlessly entertaining, but not something I really engage with. Amusing (and, I suspect, often made up) stories are interspersed with random political stuff and recipes, and that is not really where I’m at. Bluesky is more serious but also almost silent. My old Twitter pals are scattered everywhere and we really don’t have a community any more. We just shout (or sob) endlessly into the void.

And don’t get me started on Facebook, which used to be a way of keeping in touch with people you don’t see around everyday, but which is now (at least on my feed) endless rants about the US administration (I don’t like it either, but I don’t appreciate the constant long messages about what’s going on in a strange political system a long way away), links to articles hidden behind paywalls, and plugs for theatrical shows I will need to take out a second mortgage to visit.

Speaking of shouting into the void, much the same thing is happening to my blog. I used to get very healthy readership of my blog posts. The posts haven’t changed. Occasionally I may even repost an old one that was very popular some years ago. But readership has dropped off a cliff. I suspect Google is fiddling with the algorithms again. Every so often Google changes the way it recommends blog posts and sometimes this works in my favour and I suddenly get massive readership and other times it doesn’t and – well, I’m not sure that many people will have even noticed this week’s post didn’t appear.

Does it matter that my great thoughts on (to take a recent example) the movers and shakers of Georgian Twickenham don’t reach an audience of thousands? It may be good for my ego to think that people care what I write, but what (as my mother used to say) does that have to do with the price of fish?

It might not affect the price of fish, but it does affect the profitability of writing. (I use the word ‘profitability’ loosely. If you take into account the cost of time spent writing at even the legal minimum wage, we are looking at the depth of the losses.) I’ve blogged recently about the financial reality of writing fiction. The sad truth is that few authors can afford to pay for enough marketing to enable potential readers to find their books in the hundreds of thousands of works published every year. They rely on word of mouth and one of the cheapest ways of spreading the word about your books used to be through social media and channels like my blog. (I do plug other writers’ works there as well as my own.) With social media and blogging both reaching fewer and fewer people, I have being dabbling in advertising. I’ve tried both Facebook and Amazon and discovered that, though they may increase sales, it involves a significant up-front financial investment which may never pay for itself. More importantly, it involves quite a lot of thought and effort. I didn’t retire to allow myself more time for writing so that I can fritter it all away on advertising my books. So I don’t. Which means that sales drop and the whole business of writing becomes less obviously worthwhile – especially on gloriously sunny days when I could be outside doing other things.

Am I going to abandon my blog entirely and never write another book? Probably not. But I will be cutting back on social media and the amount of effort I put into my blog. If you get in touch, I do read everything that is sent me by e-mail, comments on this blog, or messaging on social media and I usually try to reply. But, for now, I’m going to concentrate on enjoying the summer. I spent most of last weekend dancing in the open air and I loved it. I hope you all find something you love and spend the next couple of months doing that.

Enjoy your summer!