All Good Things Must Come to an End

by Nancy Martin                 

Get out your hankies, folks.

We started The Lipstick Chronicles in May of 2005 when Harley Jane Kozak, Sarah Strohmeyer, Susan McBride and I met at the Romantic Times Convention in St. Louis and decided we'd band together to create a smart, witty, entertaining blog that might attract readers to our books.  Since then, we've written, laughed, added new bloggers, said farewell to a few others. Behind the scenes, we've become sisters. (On the masthead we might call ourselves the Tarts, but at the water cooler, we refer to one other as blogsisters.)  But most importantly, we found you, dear readers.  With you, we've shared life, death, divorce, sickness, weddings, new babies, new books . . . and a lot of laughs. We've traveled long distances to meet face-to-face.  We've had lunch, thrown a party or two, and even opened our guest rooms to each other. We created a community. A family. And we've had a wonderful run.

But after nearly 2400 posts, two and a half million pageviews, and almost 83,000 comments . . . well, the band is packing up, the bar is closing and the clock is striking midnight.  Her, Margie is putting on her glass slippers and heading out the back door with her prince(s) charming.

Yes, it's time to turn out the lights at The Lipstick Chronicles.

Why?  Well, this blog was intended to find new readers for our books, and we've accomplished that—many times over.  But our hits have stagnated, even started dropping.  Most of us have moved on to other forms of social media.  Blogs seem too long to read now. We're forging new relationships on Facebook, Goodreads, and Twitter. And even more tech innovations are coming. To us, it seems as if the era for blogs has passed. 

And, truth be told, authors are stretched thin.  Used to be, we could write books, and once a year we'd pack a suitcase and go on a book tour to meet readers. Some of us sent out newsletters and postcards. (Seems quaint now, doesn't it?) But travel got expensive--postage, too--and everybody decided it was easier, cheaper, and more efficient to reach out virtually. Blogging started out as a wonderful way to connect with readers. But blogging grew into so many other time-consuming online ventures that authors just can't keep up anymore.  We can't do everything---blogging, tweeting, keeping tabs on Facebook—and still write the books we want to write (and hope that you still want to read.)

So we're closing the offices of The Lipstick Chronicles on January 1.

Between now and then, we want to make the most of our time together. We want to hear from you, dear backbloggers.  Although our mission has been different from other writer blogs—not to teach you how to write or to sell you our books, exactly, but to show that we're writers who can provoke a thought, crack a joke, and entertain—we hope to guide you to other bloggers who will continue our tradition.  And we want to make sure we can still find each other once we power down. We'll help you locate our FB pages and our Twitter names and our Goodreads links. Many of my blog sisters have new ventures to announce, but I'll let them do the honors in the coming weeks. Trust me, there won't be any shortage of places we can continue to meet.

In other words, it's not the end.  It's a new beginning. The party's just moving on.