Thinking of Starting a Blog? Don't.

[lydamorehouse]

 This is the advice that LinkedIn is giving folks.  I skimmed the article*, and it's clear that their audience is not people like us, who still use blogs as a kind of public, daily journal... a community. I do think they're right about the traditional author blog, though. Do people read those? (I suspect that folks here might not be the best sample audience to ask, since, I'm guessing: yes?)  I have to admit that I've stopped keeping up either my Tate blog or the Wyrdsmiths one. I was recently asked if I would write a blog post for a friend of mine who is still trying to keep up the traditional article-based blog and I kept forgetting to do it for her because blogs just aren't part of my mindset. (It's an interesting topic, though, so I should try to remember to do it. She wanted me to distill some of my stories about trying to do NaNoWriMo as a previously published author.  Spoiler: I failed miserably.)

I guess what's interesting to me about this is that I'm wondering if I'm alone in finding myself leaving social media more and more in favor of the longer form. To be completely fair, I've always sucked at Twitter. I always felt a tremendous pressure to be clever on Twitter. I think it's the brevity, and I've never learned how to do the sort of tweet rants that people do, where you read the collective thread. The only thing I've ever enjoyed on Twitter was the GayYA book club.   I liked that because it had a limited time period: come at 8 EST and it lasts an hour. I can devote an hour to hunting through hashtags, refreshing my feed, etc. I just have zero clue how to find things on Twitter (probably because I initially friended too many people.)  Anyway, the point is, I liked those. They were a tiny community that I could drop in and belong to for an hour or so.  

Tumblr, on the other hand, I totally got.  I had a guide who gave me some tips about how to maximize my experience, but Tumblr functions on .gifs (which I adore) and long-form blogging... and art, lots of fan art.  I took to Tumblr pretty naturally, plus it was, for a time, where my fandom lived.

But, I do wonder if people are like me and starting to crave more of the mundane? Maybe people can find it on Facebook and whatnot, but I find myself wanting to dive deeper. Hence, my pen palling, I suppose.

Meh, just a bunch of random, unconnected thoughts. There they are.



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*Okay, went back and looked further into this. Apparently, I'm supposed to have some kind of "interest network" now? I don't have a clue how that would even work.

Comments

[naomikritzer]

...you're not only blogging long form, you're doing it on DREAMWIDTH. Why are you even looking at LinkedIn for their thoughts on this?

[lydamorehouse]

Well, there is that. :-)

[eagle]

Wow, that essay is an extended description of an entire view of the world that I am so desperately glad I don't have. It sounds utterly miserable to be constantly worrying about the return on your "hustle" and measuring your commercial audience for everything you do.

I guess I agree with it to the tentative degree that running a blog with a strict schedule of posting as a business endeavor and a form of advertising is probably not a great return on investment. But that's utterly so not why I blog. Hopefully that's not why most authors feel like they need to blog?

I just want to chat with people about interesting things and get ideas out of my head and understand what I think about something a bit better through the exercise of writing it down.

[lydamorehouse]

I totally agree with you in terms of why you blog.

You ask if you think this is why most authors feel like they have to blog, and I'm going to throw out a tentative "yes...?" At least, for me, when I first started out, there was a certain amount of expectation that blogging would be a part of your promotion. Even as late as Precinct 13, my publisher wanted me to write soft-advertisement posts in guest spots on popular book blogs. I HATED this kind of writing and was especially bad at it (possibly why Precinct 13 is my last professionally published book??)

However, I have long argued that no reader, including myself, has ever not recognized soft-advertisement for what it is and been completely and utterly turned OFF by it. I think that how people find writers on the internet (outside of the obvious reviews) is very magical and can not be duplicated by any form of "hustle." For instance, I picked up Cherie Priests books because I adored the stupid videos she posted of her cat (at the time), Spain. When I found out she also wrote SF/F, I was like, "Yes, sign me up. That's Spain's mom!" How could you ever distill that into anything anyone else could ever use as a promotional tool? You can't.

And, yeah, for me, what I LOVE is reading about the mundanity of people's lives, what they did, what they thought about... all of it.

[eagle]

Interesting -- thank you for the background!

If something is standard advice like that, I assume that it either works or at least did work at some point in the past. (Rarely this isn't the case, but usually standard advice worked for someone.) I find that interesting since I don't think it works on me? But I suppose, say, Scalzi's Big Idea posts are that sort of thing (advertising guest posts on a popular author blog) and are very popular.

Maybe this is how people find out about new books and new authors when they don't have a good reading social network, or at least time to chase it?

Speaking as a reader, I mostly buy books via reviews, but not commercial reviews. When I find an author I really like, I often see if they have a personal blog, and then I start reading that and see what other books they really like, and try reading those. Some authors I really like read things I don't like at all, but the hit rate is fairly high. And then I repeat the process. I don't even remember what path got me here originally, but I loved the AngeLINK series, so here I am. And then when you mention other authors whose work you admire, I go take a look. Although mostly I'm reading because I love hearing the details of people's lives that they feel like sharing!

That approach gets me more books than I can ever possibly read in my lifetime, so I mostly ignore the hustles, which have a lower hit rate for me. But I suppose it can be hard for an author who doesn't know anyone to break in and find that first person to read their book, and maybe the hustle is the way they hope to do that.

[lydamorehouse]

Book promotion and how (and IF) it works is one of those endless conversations authors have among themselves. There are, I think, two things that are sure bets. One you and I already mentioned is book reviews. For the most part, NY Publishing houses are in charge of making sure your galley/ARC goes to the right places. I should note that I had at least one of my books not get a galley. I had to scramble to try to make sure that reviewers got something. Not everyone is considered worthy of the in-house cost it takes to print up a galley. Without a pre-version of your book, sometimes you're stuck sending out author's copies to reviewers on your own dime AFTER the book has come out.

I think, in fact, that it's a result of this kind of laissez faire attitude a lot of publishers have towards the ONE SURE-FIRE way of getting readers to be aware of your next book, that sent authors into a tizzy of "hustle."

I kind of blame Scalzi (whom I know and like) for the idea that authors can build their own audiences via a clever blog. Whatever is an outlier in terms of its success and it started long before Scalzi started publishing. But, there's no doubt that if you get one of the coveted Big Idea spots, you can get a boost. (Though I don't know that it helped Resurrection Code all that much.)

This is why at this point, I kind of think "magic" is the actual answer for what sells books. When Archangel Protocol came out I busted my butt doing all the self-promotion things I could possibly think of. Fallen Host got remaindered right before it made the preliminary Nebula Ballot. I remember running into Penguin's sales rep at the Midwest Booksellers Conference and asking him about that. He just shrugged and said, "Your books sell great... REGIONALLY." From what I could tell, that meant that the only promotional stuff I'd been doing that worked was the bookstore signings (I didn't get a tour, so I booked myself anywhere I could drive to reasonably) and convention appearances. (And MAYBE the local press articles I managed to get.)

I did NOTHING for my romances and they out sold my science fiction by leaps and bounds.

Magic, I'm telling you. MAGIC.

[lydamorehouse]

Oh, and thanks for being a fan of Archangel Protocol!

[wild_irises]

I perhaps promote this far too often, but I commend to everyone Samuel R. Delany's thoughts on the difference between "contact" and "network," in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

Not sure I want to even read that essay ...

[lydamorehouse]

I will look for that. Thanks! (And, yeah, no, the article is maddening.)