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 18th
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
No comments:
Post a Comment