John Clayton's Blog

The New York Times today notices that blogging is a worthy literary activity. Not that it's literature, but that good bloggers often make good authors. One reason they may be noticing: we get stories much faster than the Times does. In fact, the WriterL discussion of marketing later moved to blogs, and I said this about this blog:

I [started it] because many in the publishing industry believe blogs will help authors sell books. (For example, see: http://www.johnclaytonbooks.com/2004/07/get-your-authors-to-blog.html). It's also a place to post ideas that don't quite make it into articles, or evolving thoughts on a topic I'm still exploring. I wanted to get the quirks out of mine long before publication.

To start, I went to blogger.com and simply followed the instructions. It's all free. Blogger's software manages all the interactions with your web-server, including archives. Once you have it set up, posting to your blog is about as easy as sending an email.

The most positive result is the robustness of my website. Remember how merely having a website was going to help authors sell books? But then you didn't have very much content on the site, which meant few return visitors, which meant nobody linked to you, which meant Google didn't rank you highly, which meant nobody bought your books. The blog gives me lots of evolving content, return visitors, links, and Google rankings. Twice in the last month, friends of my biography subject (Caroline Lockhart, who died in 1962) have emailed me out of the blue. They both provided interesting anecdotes and expressed interest in buying the book. I think the blog brought this about.

The most negative aspect is the waste of time. I've pledged myself to post at least twice a week, but often I dread it. And then a blog (like a book) demands marketing. Not enough to simply write well: you really should be telling people about it. Many bloggers frequently comment on others' blogs, creating a positive, self-sustaining, but tiny community. Others try to be plugged in 24/7, so as to blog quickly about an event such as the death of Iris Chang. How else to become a hero in the rapid-response blogosphere? Sadly however, such routes mean that you could spend so much time blogging (and marketing your blogging) that you don't get around to writing (or even marketing your writing).

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