To Blog - Or Not to Blog?

To Blog – Or Not to Blog

As a writer, should you blog? It’s time consuming and you won’t make any money from it, but there are intangible benefits. If you have a large following, it can help build your platform – your qualifications for publishing. Publishers will ask you about the number of followers and amount of traffic on your blog. It also gives you a platform to market your book: many followers will purchase the book.

With blogging, you are giving away your art for free, and contributing to the consumer attitude that all things digital should be free. Plus blogging takes an enormous amount of time to write: you can’t just write down a few ideas, but you have to write entire essays which, it’s worth repeating, you give away for free. Blogging isn’t a sustainable business model for most people. That said, I do have several friends who have turned their blogs into book deals, notably John DeFerrari, who turned his Streets of Washington blog into a dynamite book, Lost Washington, D.C.

I started this blog, Throwing Spaghetti, shortly before my third book, The Potomac River was published. I get a few dozen hits each week (in the two months since I’ve launched it, I’ve gotten more than 1,300 hits), so it is being read, but then again I’m not Andrew Sullivan, who probably gets hundreds of thousands of hits each week. 

An alternative to blogging is “microblogging.” That is, using Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. You use the status update features on those social networking sites to engage your readers. It is far less time consuming, as you can post an update in under a minute. Social media is “the poor person’s publicist,” as I like to call it.

I both blog and microblog. But I also understand why many people don’t blog: blogging takes an enormous amount of time that they simply don't have, and many readers don't have time to read your extensive essays. But short, continual updates on social media can be far more manageable. Microblogging is less time consuming – for you and your readers. People are awash in information, and your blog often becomes another drop in a vast ocean of noise. 

Shortly after my first book, The Prohibition Hangover, came out in 2009, I was walking down 18^th Street in Washington, DC and passed what was the Lexis-Nexis building. This is a firm that provides content for law firms and other businesses on a subscription basis. The entire building stood vacant and a “For Lease” sign was draped over the front door. One more business model threatened by free content. It gave me pause to wonder how we writers can make a living at our craft if all content becomes free.

Garrett Peck

www.garrettpeck.com