Further to the Writers Union of Canada AGM panel RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE

Running a blog is harder than setting up a website. But it’s easier in some ways too.

It’s harder because you have to do the work of maintaining it with regular fresh material. A blog that hasn’t had a post for months is arguably worse than a static website. It’s obvious to new visitors that it hasn’t been maintained and it certainly isn’t keeping any audience attached with regular missives. Also, it’s likely that your last post—what visitors first see—wasn’t itself explicitly designed to capture attention and make people love you, which is what a static web page might hope to do. I mean, if it was your last post for months you were probably losing interest.

This means you have to have both the discipline to keep up a regular blogging schedule, and the ideas to keep posting material that will be interesting to your readers.

This relates to what you choose to blog about. Ideally you want to drive book sales so you should chose things to write about that would be attractive to the same people who would be attracted to your books. In my opinion blogs that are like publicly accessible diaries are only appropriate if you want an audience restricted to close friends, or if you have a huge public profile already (in which case maybe you don’t need a blog).

My book is about words and etymology and specifically the words we use for our bodies. I chose to podcast and blog about the etymologies of common words. In doing so I didn’t regard my writing as just being given away for free. I hope to be able to repurpose and later sell some of the reservoir of writings and audio recordings I’ve produced.

Using my imagination I might suggest as an example, perhaps a murder-mystery writer who runs a blog and weekly or biweekly could put up a piece discussing a single kind of plot device, perhaps comparing how they used it with some other famous author (I made this up so I don’t know if it would work). Maybe if you have characters that live on from book to book the blog could be a fictional personal diary for them.

A blog requires dedication, it’s a bit time consuming and taxes your creativity. But I also said that a blog is in some ways actually easier than setting up a web page. That’s what I’ll talk about next time.

This blog post is a duplicate of one of a series of emails I’m sending to the Writers Union of Canada listserv in advance of the Writers Union AGM panel session RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE taking place at 1:15 on Friday May 23. I’ll be joining Cynthia Good and Rick Broadhead for that panel.