Light Blogging This Week
Filed Under: Uncategorized
I probably won’t have the usually scheduled posts up on Wednesday and Friday. I’m going up to Laramie to participate and help with the Launchpad Astronomy Workshop and I don’t think the schedule will allow me the time to blog. Some of you will be very pleased at this, judging from the grumbles I’ve gotten on Twitter this week about my last post. Enjoy your vacation from me!
Maybe I will actually start writing hard science fiction after Launchpad. Not likely, but who knows. Maths are hard. Much easier to just make up stuff!
Writers Should Not Blog About Writing
Filed Under: Writing Advice, Writing Process, creativity
We’re writers, so we should write about everything, right? Not if we care about maintaining an audience, we shouldn’t. Despite our deep-seated belief that every thing that happens to us and every thought we have is interesting to others, some things writers like to blog about are just plain boring or, worse, portray them in a negative light. I’ve learned most of these because I’ve done them and driven off readers with them, so don’t think I’m setting these down as reminders for others. They apply to me doubly so. They include:
- Your rejection letters. You can use them to illustrate a point, but blogging “rejected by F&SF, 8 days” isn’t very interesting. Also, it makes you look kinda like a schlub when your blog is full of rejection letters. Your readers only need to know when you have new work coming out. They don’t care how many agents turned you down, or how many rejections you gathered along the way before the sale.
- Your word count for the day. Good for you, seriously. I know some people use this as a kind of social reinforcement, but personally, I can’t stand looking at a blog and seeing nothing but a long list of short posts talking about what you wrote that day.
- Your favorite snippet from your work-in-progress. Out of context, it isn’t nearly as neat or interesting as you think it is. Publish the story and we’ll bask in the glow of your genius then.
- Grammar. Snore.
- In general, the craft and daily travails of being a writer.
I firmly believe that writers should be interesting for something other than being a writer. It’s a rare individual who can be scintillating to the general public while talking about the sausage-making of writing.* If you’re a writer, surely you’re passionate about something other than writing. Blog about whatever that is.
Look at it this way–who is your target audience? The subject of writing is interesting to other writers and aspiring writers. They are not necessarily the readers you want, because there are not very many of them. If your goal is to collect a following greater than a few hundred people, then you need a subject of broader interest–even just the genre that you write in is more interesting than the act of writing itself.
Clearly I am not following the advice of the last point here. I write about writing for a good reason, and that’s because my freelance business caters to writers. Writers are my target audience for these posts, so I am comfortable with it. As I complete my business website, these kinds of advice posts will transition to that site, and my personal blog will become more, well, personal.
*Exempt from this advice are writers with staggering readerships, such as Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi.
ETA:
Nick Mamatas has this to say in the comments, and it’s a strong point:
So I took this advice much further than I should have. And I should point out that my advice was aimed squarely not at writers who blog as a kind of personal journal. I aim it at people who are looking to deliberately and methodically grow an audience. If you’re writing a personal journal style blog, but want to use your blog to grow an audience, I thnk you need to think about transitioning the kind of content you post.
On Getting Your Content in Front of People
Filed Under: My Writing, Web Design
Smashing Magazine, a great website dealing with all things web design, had a really great article the other day titled “10 Ways to Put Your Content in Front of More People.”
Not all of these ideas are applicable to everyone–some are quite specifically techy. Most creatives don’t really need an Adobe Air app on someone’s desktop, and they don’t need to create an API or widget (although widgets are often produced for authors by larger publishers. I don’t know that they get used by fans much, but they do get made).
However, the basics, like Facebook, Twitter, guest posts, and more are all very applicable methods. Using multimedia is still somewhat rare in the author circles I frequent, so it’s open for some real innovation. Book trailers are just a start. I’m working with one client on something that takes advantage of all these options. More on that when it’s done.
My approach for my author clients is that any readers of their online media presence are potential readers of their books. But I don’t have them treat their online presence as a giant advertising platform for those books. No, the key to getting more people to look at your content, above all else, is to write compelling content.
There are tricks to making your web content more compelling when it’s in a blog style format. The specifics of those techniques I save for my consulting clients. In general, pay attention to the kinds of posts that go viral, get retweeted and linked all over. And match those post styles, but within your own niche.
Of secondary importance, after the content, is establishing a good niche and thus an identity. If you maintain a niche, create a solid identity (and thus some authority), and write in a linkable and web-friendly format about compelling subjects, you’ll grow readers like crazy.
As many blogs out there as there are, people are always looking for something new that grabs them by the throat. Something that educates them, or titiliates. There are a lot of ways you can be compelling. Hell, we all struggle with that in the non-online types of writing we have to do. But it’s not enough to just blog about your day and your word count, or your latest photos. It’s fine if you don’t mind what your audience size is online, but if you’re interested in building a following, you have to take it further.
That’s what I’ve been trying to do with these posts, appearances on podcasts, and so on. And to be nice about all of it. I genuinely enjoy helping people with this stuff, and sharing what I’ve learned. So the extra readers are really just a bonus on top of the main motivation.
A Serious Question for My Blog Readers
Filed Under: My Writing
It’s a simple question. I’m looking for an angle on my blogging, and it’s often been suggested that I find problems and solve them. So I ask those of you who already read me:
What are the problems you’re struggling with, whether it be with writing, or web design, or photography, or any other subject?
I want my blogging work to be worthwhile, and I want it to help people. I really do like sharing what I know, what I’ve learned. I may not have answers to your problems, but I’ll try to find them, or point you to people who do.
I’ll pick one of the most insightful commenters on this post between here and LiveJournal and send them a copy of the new anthology, Federations, edited by John Joseph Adams, and containing stories by Lois McMaster Bujold, George R.R. Martin, Anee McCaffrey, Alastair Reynolds, Robert Silverberg, and uh, me.
So, spill?
