Historical fiction author Jody Hedlund, who’s also a prolific blogger, announced some Writing News today that caught my eye. Jody is a great communicator and has built a fantastic platform with non-obtrusive marketing, practical advise, and a very active social media presence. Nevertheless, she’s making some changes to her blogging schedule and approach. She writes:
I think the nature of blogging is changing. While blogging was once considered essential to a writer’s platform, most of us are beginning to understand that a blogging platform for fiction-writers doesn’t translate into significant sales (at least for the average blogger).
In a day and age with limited time and resources, writers are realizing their time is best spent writing books—including eshorts and enovellas. Getting our stories in front of readers does much more for furthering our careers than blogging. (emphasis mine)
As a result, Jody will be transitioning away from posts aimed mainly at writers, to posts aimed at connecting with readers. Her reasoning is that…
A fiction writer’s BOOKS are the primary means of growing readership, not their BLOGS.
This point is unarguable. Unless, of course, your blog is entirely about your books. And that’s the rub for us writers. Most of us don’t want to talk about ourselves and our books 24/7.
I don’t know many fiction writers who LOVE blogging. Most of us find it a chore coming up with fresh ideas and approaches to subjects that are covered ad nauseam in the blogosphere… and still maintain a decent fiction writing schedule. Which means HOW we approach blogging could be what keeps us from burning out or becoming a shill.
So here’s my idea:
Blogging will be harder for the fiction author if their primary reason for blogging is to sell books.
Well, you ask. Isn’t that what you’re trying to do here? Sell books? Of course! Who else is going to sell them? However, this blog is just one platform for doing so. I don’t blog mainly to sell books. I blog to connect with people. I blog to express myself. I blog to make sense of things. Of course, I will talk about my books, continue to advertize them on this site, and occasionally gush. But if that was my main objective, you’d smell it like a rat. And I’d get really, really, bored.
Almost a year ago, I wrote a post entitled One Blogging Rule Worth Breaking. That “rule” is the one encouraged by many professionals. Bloggers are consistently encouraged to find a niche and then mine that audience, to narrow your subject matter in order to target specific readers. They suggest that blogging randomly is antithetical to building a fan base.
But regularly blogging (2-3 times a week) about one theme or subject — unless you are a bona fide insider, with extensive knowledge of a subject, and a crack network of experts at your disposal — is precisely why many bloggers burn out. As Jody writes:
After blogging about writing and marketing for the past three years, I’ve tackled nearly everything there is to say regarding writing and marketing. …I’m not sure that I have THAT much more to add to the discussion that hasn’t already been said.
I totally get this! Which is why, in my aforementioned article, I concluded with this:
If I had to give advice to a blogger about how to have staying power, it would be this: Write about what interests you, when it interest you. If what interests you is all over the map, so be it.
Ultimately, it is more important that you blog regularly, than that you define a niche. People will read your blog long-term because they like your voice, appreciate your spin, and the community of commenters, not because you are an expert on any one given subject.
All that to say, I don’t believe blogging is essential to a fiction writer’s platform. But it helps. In fact, it can really help. Especially when you’re a self-published or small press author who doesn’t have the marketing resources available like the big dogs. So the key for the fiction writer is finding an approach to blogging that will help them stay fresh and do it long term.
Your thoughts?
My recent observations have been aligning with Jody’s so it’s nice to have confirmation. I like blogging, but to do it properly in order to build an audience, it’s a full-time job (IMO). Last year and prior, I allowed myself to become stressed about blogging…it seemed like a chore, and I was starting to feel bitter any time I heard “writers must blog 3 times a week”. I was also starting to believe this writing thing is an impossible gig in our modern age…without it becoming some kind of messed up mental prostitution.
This year and forward, I’m going to focus more of my energies on short fiction. I currently have 4 stories out for consideration (soon to be 5) and I’m a much happier camper as a result. 🙂
p.s. I don’t know how you do it. You have a stronger constitution than I do. Glad you’re still blogging, though, and I hope you continue. It keeps things interesting.
Sending out your work is way more important than blogging. It’s active rather than passive-aggressive (which is how I view blogging). So good for you, Jessica.
I’m passive-aggressive?! No! You know I live to be aggressive.
“4, soon to be 5” ? Nice. Congrats. Hope they get picked up.
Heh heh. I received a rejection today. One of the comments was “I just didn’t really see the point in this.” 😀
Until it sells a million copies. Then they’ll see the point. 😉
Mike, I think you have the right idea here. I know that I’ve been blogging since 2006. Last year I changed up my focus to write on missional topics on Mondays and writing on Wednesdays. Having the specifics gives me discipline to come up with something and keep me going. But I also leave myself room to blog about what I want, because it’s my blog.
As far as Jody, I’ve seen many writing types do what she did – back the blogging off because they’ve exhausted the topic. Brandilyn Collins had a very large blog following, but she got to the point where it wasn’t in her best interest anymore to keep it up.
But we’ve got to keep working on our “Platform”, don’t we? 😉
Looking at the blog as just a marketing tool was very limiting and frustrating. Now I see it like you do…it’s a way to have a conversation with people from all over. Whether or not they read my books is a secondary consideration. My blog followers aren’t customers, they’re friends. And when someone does pop in and say they read my book and enjoyed it…well, that’s just icing on the cake!
(But for the record, the blog does sell books. I stumbled onto your blog…enjoyed it…hung out a while…and just downloaded “Subterranea”. I will read it soon as soon as I get time!)
Thanks, Elizabeth. Like you, I don’t consider my blog visitors, first, as customers. It’s so much easier on relationships, even cyber relationships, to not have ulterior motives behind every post and every discussion. Selling books along the way is fun. And getting people to read my blog posts is a start 😉
I’ve been reading Jody’s blog since before she was agented and published. I had stopped reading it recently because I was no longer interested in reading about writing and publishing. As an assessment, I would say that Jody was successful in social media because she has a generous and engaging personality. She’s a successful writer because of her books. Granted, I only read the first one, but it was unexpectedly good. She writes page-turners, and that’s what many people want in a book.
I enjoy her books. We were at college together. That was a nonsequiter.
Well, this blog is really great, Mike, and I applaud your creativity and insight. I tortured myself for months trying to figure out what to blog about; I felt totally lost and discouraged because every fiction writer was blogging the same things. Who did I want to read my blog anyway? Well, readers in my book’s genre. This took me months to figure out. Since I love short stories: ghost stories/horror/supernatural and prefer the old classic ones, I decided to do a blog on that (which is the same genre as my novel). Would anyone care? A few people are interested, but so far, it’s been really fun for me to reread Dickens, or A.C. Doyle, M.R. James, Lovecraft and cite little “tasters” of their stories and links to the full text on my blog. I only do it once a week, my Tuesday Tale of Terror. Granted it’s a limited audience, but I do think you are right, Mike, in blogging about what you care about. I doubt that my blog will increase my book sales. I’m hoping it’ll create credibility for me as a reader and writer in sharing the love of reading. My dead authors’ society of short stories is a path that I’ll follow for now; it’s all trial and error anyway, right?
Old classic ghost stories? Sign me up, Paula! You had me at “M.R. James”…. (Actually, you had me at Dickens…but M.R. James and Lovecraft sealed the deal). Definitely be checking that out.
Paula, that subject is right up my alley. Although, I’m not too up on classic ghost stories, I’ve blogged a lot about horror fiction, Christian horror, ghosts, the supernatural and paranormal, etc. Which, I think, reinforces the concept here about building a platform. Even if we’re not immediately selling books, networking with those who read and have knowledge of a genre definitely can’t hurt. Like Alan O, I’ll be checking out your site. Thanks for commenting!
Mike, you have a great blog and you aren’t here primarily to sell (which is probably WHY you have a great blog) AND you actually enjoy blogging, so you would be stupid not to blog.
The thing is, we shouldn’t try to shove every fiction writer into the same stiff mold when we don’t all fit. Some of us do not enjoy stirring up arguments and hosting debates. Some of us do not want to share our opinions with the entire world or “engage” and “connect” on a personal level. Some of us really ARE introverted and find people intimidating and frightening, not to mention emotionally draining.
I feel no need whatsoever to “get to know” fiction authors in order to read their books. Yes, I have author friends, but quite a few of them write stories I don’t like and don’t want to read. I also read authors whose background I found out about accidentally or after I read them. Very often, I wish I’d stayed in the dark because their personal and/or political ideology repulses me. It’s much easier to be an unadulterated fan when you can imagine the author is more virtuous than s/he probably is.
I don’t understand why others feel any need to “connect” to a writer just to read fiction. Stay in the dark! Forget about ME, just READ MY BOOKS!
That “wish I’d stayed in the dark” has happened to me a lot. Of course, the reverse is also true–that I’ve enjoyed connecting with authors whose books I already loved, when they weren’t too ideologically hard-hitting. Or when I agreed with them. 😉
Mike, I agree pretty much from start to finish. For myself, I blog because I love it, because writing has always been the way I think through things. If it helps me sell books eventually, that will mainly be because blogging lets me meet and make friends with a lot of other writers, and sometimes networking seems to be half the battle.
A year or two ago, it hit me that writing about writing-and-publishing couldn’t and shouldn’t be my niche, though sometimes I write about writing as art. I don’t have a niche, really, except for being shamelessly bookish, and I’m comfortable with that. There’s nothing at all wrong with the personal blog, and honestly I enjoy that most from my favorite authors, too. I’ve followed Shannon Hale’s faithfully for years.
Blogging is also the only form of social media that I get along with well. I like the slower pace of it. Twitter acts like a leech on my creative powers, and Facebook is tailored to extroverts.
All that to say: when you say “I blog to connect with people. I blog to express myself. I blog to make sense of things” it would seem you’re in it for the only reasons it’s worth doing. Best of luck. 🙂
Caprice, it’s kind of a unique perspective you have — not the part about not feeling a need to blog, but the part about not feeling a need to know more about authors you like. I can’t think of any professional artist I like — musician, writer, street artist, journalist, sushi chef, sword swallower — whom I wouldn’t like to know more about. How they started. What they learned along the way. the peculiarities of their craft. Of course, there will be things we find weird or disagree with. But that’s the nature of all relationships. As it relates to our own profession, don’t you think we can gather wisdom from each other… about storytelling, character building, plot management, time management, marketing, mentoring, and whether blogging is still essential to a writer’s platform? It could be that by not blogging, not only is a writer not multiplying their talent (selling more books), but that they’re not establishing relationships with people / readers / writers who can benefit?
I’ve been blogging since before I wanted to publish a book. My blog’s about stuff our family does, and also an art journal. So I’m always posting doodles on there, as well as weird stuff I’ve happened across while doing research. I cross-post a lot of stuff to my deviantart journal, where I have a lot more readers. It’s just for fun and I don’t really care if I have a lot of readers or not. If it helps me sell a few books, well then, hey, that’s gravy.
If blogging’s a chore, don’t do it. I understand it doesn’t work for some people, and that’s fine. They can spend more time writing than I do. 🙂
Oh, Hot Button! Hot Button!
1) To quote Jody: “blogging was once considered essential to a writer’s platform…”
True; but to put that in the broader context: Once upon a time, blogging was NOT considered essential to a writer’s platform, because there was no such thing. Then blogs were invented (by Al Gore, presumably), and it became very fashionable and trendy to insist that writers must blog. Now, as with all ascendent paradigms, the luster begins to fade over time, and more people are openly raising legitimate questions.
2) One of those legitimate questions is, (and Jody uses the key term) does a blogging platform translate into *significant* sales? When I unpack that question, here’s what it means to me: Do we have the data to prove, unequivocally, an essential causal effect between blogging and sales figures? By “essential,” I mean, does blogging account for a very high percentage of the variance in book sales? Is it the most important factor? Or even one of the top ten?
One author sells 2.5 million copies. Another sells 10,000. A third sells 200. How many factors account for that difference? And where does “blogging” fall on the list?
If blogging truly were essential to sales, then well-constructed marketing research should be able to prove that out. But though I’ve heard the question raised (increasingly), I’ve never seen it answered with hard data.
Why doesn’t Mike Duran sell more books than Bentley Little? Mike blogs like a madman, and Bentley considers social media a prostitution of his privacy (I don’t have the link handy, but google “Bentley Little” & “Horror Zine interview” for one sample of his views on this.) Maybe it’s because the correlation between quality blogging and book sales is more mythical than statistical.
3) Good for her. If Christian fiction is going to connect with the culture, and elevate as an artform, (as per recent & past posts here) it will require writers who are dedicated to reading more deeply, and writing more often. Making better use of those “Limited time and resources…”
I forget who said it, but one writer put it this way: Writing is like taking a shower on the second floor of your home. Talking about writing is like opening a hydrant in the yard below.
It’s an opportunity cost scenario… every moment you spend *not* writing fiction leaves you that much farther from your goals (assuming your real goal is to generate finished, high-quality novels).
Bentley Little’s publisher spends a lot more on marketing than Mike Duran’s.
Exactly. And I’d agree that on the list of “Factors that Influence Book Sales,” well-spent advertising dollars probably ranks high.
So from a business sense, it raises the question: Which is a better use of an authors time? To spend (for instance) 30 hours a month blogging avidly… or to get an equivalent part-time job at McDonalds and use that money to buy carefully targeted ads?
Oooh! Good question! 😉
I started blogging to have a place to say what I actually think (hard to do in a small-town life), and it’s brought about some of the best friendships I’ve ever had. So, I’ll keep doing it for that.
I agree with the idea of writing what interests, when it interests. I can’t write for free, for maybe no reason at all, on an assignment/deadline type mindset. Or I should say, I don’t need that kind of practice — magazine pieces provide that. I do need regular practice turning off the mental regulators and being free with words.
It’s not so much that blogging may help me sell books, but that it helps me *make* stories.
I write a blog because I want to engage with other people. It may someday help me sell books. It has helped me sell other people’s books.
But I don’t do anything just because it is a stepping stone to something else. I do a thing because I like/need to do THAT thing. I didn’t get married to have kids. I married because I loved my best friend. I didn’t go to college to get a particular job. I went because I wanted to learn in that atmosphere and I left when I couldn’t afford it any longer. I don’t write to make money. I don’t blog to sell books. (I don’t presently have books to sell in any case.)
I really really dislike the mindset that tells you to contrive your life around one or two goals.
Yes, I blog to engage with other people, too. And, in fact, I started blogging just for that reason. Also, I needed an outlet for my thoughts. When I started blogging for the purpose of building a platform and landing a publishing contract (because everybody said I HAD to), I immediately hated blogging. Essentially, blogging became the purpose in and of itself. That’s why I called it a passive-aggressive means to publishing in my above comment.
Aha, I see what you mean. I never thought of it as “passive-aggressive”, but that fits as well as “calculating”–which is the term I tend to use for those types of blogs and FB profiles.
Mike, You can add the use of Twitter to this. I follow the people who interest me, but when at least half their tweets are just code for “buy my book, ” I move them off the list I read.
Last year I actually surveyed the folks who read my blog, and discovered they weren’t interested in interviews or book reviews. They enjoyed some of the inside stories about writing and publishing, as well as my everyday thoughts on life in general. So, since that time, I’ve devoted Fridays to short posts about writing and Tuesdays to “stuff in general.”
Do I follow the blogs of writers because I read their work? Not really. I follow the blogs that post things that interest me. I may not agree with their thoughts, but they entertain me.
In that regard, thanks for your posts–keep on putting them up.
One of my clients recently asked a number of multi-published authors what they thought the correlation of blog posts to sales was. The answer was a resounding, “there’s no way to know and I’m getting tired of doing it.” The consensus seems to be that blogs engage people when the conversation is engaging, not when selling.
Oddly enough, Seth Godin just blogged about this same thing: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/01/the-attentionaction-paradox.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29
The Attention Paradox, as he calls it. There’s no guarantee it translates into decisions (a.k.a. sales) on the Net.
This has been a great conversation with everyone! It seems clear that whether we are writers of fiction and/or bloggers, the goal is to first and foremost encourage reading in the areas that we like to read (adding that personal touch through a blog if we choose), and also to encourage readers to read our work (exposing our novels to readers). I see this as two hands working together to produce a common good for all readers and writers, not just sales numbers or Amazon rankings.
Most here haven’t read my blog, so I’ll take a brief moment to tell what I DO:
M (nothing)
T IDEAS ON TUESDAY (I rotate through SF-F-H ideas for YA fiction)
W (nothing)
Th Short “chapters” from four Works In Progress
F (nothing)
S Husband of Breast Cancer Survivor (http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/)
S Rotate through POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS (http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/), Slice of PIE, WRITING ADVICE
The Ideas and Short Chapters I do for me. The idea generation is good practice and has built up a massive “idea catalogue” for ME. But anyone can steal whatever ones they want; Thursday’s post is a 1000 words or less exploration and plot development of whatever novels I’m working on (I KNOW THAT PUTTING IT ON MY BLOG CONSTITUTES PUBLICATION…please. I’m not dumb! However, it’s a first draft in which I develop character, plot, location and background. I often change things (like names of characters — and I do NOT go back and change them in earlier posts. Nor do I fill “plot holes” or fix the story when the plot goes in a direction that appears to be a non-sequitur. That’s WHY I do it in my blog. It’s story development.) I pull them down later when I finish — and then change about 70% of the material previously published…I invite criticism and if it works, I incorporate it.
So my blog(s) serve ME as well as provide a target for readers. Is it successful? I have about 1500 hits/month and has climbed steadily since I started in 2008. My Cancer blog gets about 600 hits/month but with THAT, my intent was to provide an outlet for me as well as clarify what I saw happening.
So, there you go.
Read you article, but I want to ask your suggestion..
Firstly, I’m 15 and have academics to look after but I do suppose I write decently or just fine. I have started writing a blog at http://2200ce.wordpress.com named “2200 Common Era” which is a science fictional novel.
I can’t possibly publish the book as it’s not pre-planned or it’s plot isn’t known beforehand. I write it as I get some ideas.. (There’s a term for this, writing on pants?? or something similar). I’m quite serious about it but not to the extent of publishing it.
So, I chose the blog medium. I’ve got lukewarm response so far.. I mean, I started blogging on August 15, 2014 and currently it has some ~35 posts and ~30 followers and 1k views.
Is there something I can do to make more people recognize it? Like I’d like some feedback on my writing. Is there any platform which suits my needs? What do you think or what are your suggestions?