I would like to hear your take on this topic: do you work on updating old posts?
While writing the review of “Homegoing” by Yaa Gyasi I realized that my style of writing book reviews changed a lot compared to my first year of blogging – “The Circle” by Dave Eggers was my first book review.
In the past I slightly updated some book reviews (changed the cover image, added sub-titles), but I did not work on a full transformation (text, images, formatting).
There was a case when I considered updating a post to add information about a new book from the series. In that situation I chose to work on a bigger update of the post and I re-posted it.
(+) the pros
On the one hand, I see the utility of updating posts and increasing their quality. When someone reads a book review, (s)he does not care whether it was written at the beginning of your blogging journey or after having a lot of experience. If the quality of the post is not satisfying, there are chances that the reader will just close the window.
Also, it might happen that your opinion on the topic / book changes. If a book was great at a certain moment in the past and now you feel “meh” about it, should you update the book review to reflect your current view?
(-) the cons
On the other hand, I see blogging as a way of documenting a journey – in my case, a reading journey. Therefore it is normal to have different levels of quality of the blog posts, it provides insights into how the person grew as blogger.
In addition to that, I consider that a review written while the book is still fresh in your mind offers a more genuine opinion than a review written few months / years after reading the book. And in case of re-reading the book and having a different feeling about it, you can write a new review – I can imagine reviews written for the same book, for example one by a fresh M.Sc. graduate (2015) and another by a senior manager (2025).
What’s your take on this topic? Do you update only some types of posts?
‘Till next time … happy blogging!
Georgiana
Cover image by Eiko Ojala
Readers' High Tea 
I’m more like #2, I see them as a snapshot in time and prefer to leave them as is, even with errors
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Thank you for sharing, Beth!
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I went and checked out your review of The Circle as I’ve read that too. Yes I went back and updated old posts as I saw room for improvement. I do not routinely do it but if I am referring to an old post in a current post and catch errors or flow issues, then I update 🙂
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Thanks for sharing! I read “The Circle” when I was a lot less analytical about books, now I would write the review completely different 🙂 Maybe I could write a post about it in the form of commenting my own review from years ago – that sounds like an “update” I would do for fun!
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I don’t update them unless I see a typo or find out I wrote something that was incorrect.
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Fully agree about updating typos or incorrect facts. Thank you for sharing!
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I don’t think I’ve ever updated a post, mostly for reasons you mention here–I see my blog as a sort of record of my bookish thoughts (and usually I just don’t have time to go back and update them haha). This is such an interesting topic though!! It was fun to hear your thoughts.
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Yess, the lack of time is surely an important constraint for updating old posts! Thank you so much for sharing, Holly!
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I’ve added featured images to old post but other than that, I don’t think I’ve substantially updated any! And all the post I updated are more of general informative posts, rather than reviews. I tend to leave the reviews alone – if I reread, I’d rather write a new post, especially if my thoughts on the reread are very different!
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Thank you for sharing! Regarding the featured image, I remember there was a period when I updated the first 10-15 posts in this regard, as the pictures used had a very low quality … Nowadays a spend a lot of time for choosing the visuals, when I started I did not pay much attention to this.
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I never update my older posts (unless I spot a typo!), I appreciate having a more consistent approach is good but I see the early posts as part of my blog history.
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Thank you for sharing! Early posts are always a good reminder of how much we changed, at least in regard to our the blogging style.
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I correct typos, when I spot them (I regularly do 😦 ) but otherwise not. The quality of my first posts is probably a bit dubious, but I prefer to leave them as they are.
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+1 for correcting typos! Thanks a lot for sharing 🙂
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Good topic! I’m not for making changes but I do believe a second review is worth the trouble especially when re-reading a book many years later and actually seeing it with new “mind” eyes 😉
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I really like this idea with a second review, I’ll do it when I’ll reread a book! 🙂 Usually that does not happen too often for me, at least not in the 3-5 years time span. Thanks a lot for sharing, Sofi!
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I actually had a post like this in mind after I took a second glance on my Goodreads and noticed I didn’t feel the same about some books.
From my perspective, my blog is for my readers too, not just for me and since I recommend books, I can’t be “at peace” with myself knowing that I praised a book some years ago and now I don’t like it as much or I’ve read better. I take it as a kind of duty to keep my reviews honest so I am actually going to soon post an updated review for Circe 😅
I think it’s also a matter of how you approach it. You can be both honest and keep your old views… I, for example, would just add a note at the end saying what changed in time. I don’t just re-write everything. 🙂 There’s a way for everything/every one if you have the patience to look for it
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I also feel the “duty” you’re referring to, it’s a very good way to describe my concern! Even if the review was honest at the moment I read the book, as times goes by and I read more books, I start to appreciate in a different manner (for better or for worse) the books I read before.
Thanks for the idea of adding a note at the end of the review, it’s a simple and effective solution 🙂
Thank you for joining the discussion!
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Thank you for opening the subject 🙂 It’s quite a good topic of discussion.
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