One of the things you hear just about everywhere, when you start thinking about selling your own books, is that you need to have an author platform before you even finish writing. Now, that makes sense, right? You can’t expect a lot of sales if you finish the book and drop it into the void of obscurity. That is essentially what you are doing if you haven’t made sure people know about you, and your book, before publishing.
While the author platform is a very important subject, that mechanism, as a whole, is not the purpose of this post. Rather, I want to focus on a more specific, optional aspect of the author platform: the blog.
We see blogs everywhere over everything, but is it really the best thing for the author platform? This was the route I chose, as I’m sure you must have noticed. It made perfect sense to me. When I was learning how to self-publish, information was more sparse than it is now, and much of the information I was receiving was on one of a couple of concepts: 1. Self-publishing is just vanity publishing, a way for those who aren’t good enough to get traditionally published to feed their delusions of grandeur. (Whether or not people flooding the market with AI writing are ruining what good reputation self-publishing has fought to gain is a completely different discussion. If you want my view on AI in regard to creativity, see my post, AI: Artistic Augmenter or Creative Death.) or 2. that there is just too much to do to be successful. “You have to have the team of a big publishing house to have any hope of success. Plus, you have to make your way through a minefield of scams to find real self-publishing opportunities. Self-publishing is an exercise in futility, so don’t even bother.”
I knew that traditional publishing wasn’t the best for me at the time. It still isn’t my first choice, but I will admit I have allowed it to come into consideration recently, especially as traditional publishers move toward considering the artist a little more.
All that doom and gloom when I was first starting managed to kill almost all of my confidence in my ability to be self-published. So when friends and family managed to encourage me enough to bite the bullet and take what seemed to be a leap of faith, I finally published my first children’s book. I’d like to give a special shout out to Anastasia author of Stewie That’s Eewie!. Her hand holding was instrumental in helping me push through the doubt. You can find her book on Amazon. Special thanks also go to Andy for helping me fight through formatting my book for KDP (several times because they kept rejecting it). If you haven’t already, you might want to read my post “The One Where We Ask For Help.” or “Mentors, Family, and Friends.”
I had heard that an author platform was a non-negotiable, and I had also heard about blogging. One thing I knew I wanted was to be able to encourage other authors who had been hearing mostly discouragement or might not have been getting enough information to be confident about their writing journeys. Naturally a blog seemed to be the answer.
Let’s talk a little about blogging where it relates to the creative writer. The first problem is that you are often told to post “frequently.” Frequency is then defined as somewhere around once a week. I’ve seen articles that admit the possibility of posting once or twice a month, but shortly after that push that you should actually be posting multiple times a week even to the point of once or more a day.
Let’s look at that more closely. The recommended word count is 1,500 – 2,500. Can you imagine writing that many words of meaningful content every single day? The creative writer is generally struggling to find time to get their daily word count for their WIP. We can’t afford to write 1,500 – 2,500 words or more a day on something that’s not our story. We will often feel good if we manage once a week, or every other week.
“What about AI?” someone asks. “It can dramatically increase productivity.”
Setting aside the ethical debates concerning AI, doesn’t the mere fact that AI is even suggested as a way to make a blog manageable, show that a blog is probably not the best option for someone who is trying to write any sort of book? If a blog is too burdensome to maintain without AI, then why would we, as creative writers, create a blog for our author platform?
I post only once a month because I first wrote several blog posts when I started so that someone who came across my blog wouldn’t find only one or two posts on my blog. It simply doesn’t look good.
From that work, I learned how long it actually took me to write a post. I thought of how many topics I might actually have and found, even at the start, that they were not as plentiful as I would have liked. If I wrote one blog post every week, that would be 52 blog posts every year. With the word count of 1,500 – 2,500 that equals 78,000 – 130,000 words. That, my friends, is a novel in and of itself. When we blog according to recommendations we are writing the word count equivalent of a novel or two instead of writing our creative novels.
I knew, even from the beginning, that I was multi-passionate, with several books in my head that needed writing. I’m finding inspiration everywhere for new books, and new scenes in the many books that are waiting for their turn.
The blog post work load doesn’t even count social media on which you are pressured to post, at least once a day, more often several times a day. You also have to make sure that you have the social media posts are designed to catch peoples’ attention. Otherwise, your posts do no good. People will just scroll by, and your time will have been wasted. This is another time consumer because you have to not only learn all the specifics, but keep relearning them as algorithms or trends change. Again, you are told you must craft many somethings besides your creative writing.
You are also told to guest post on other people’s blogs. That is even more blog posts you are writing beyond what you write for your own blog. No, as of this writing I have not started guest posting, but I am seriously considering it. How can I guest post if I am barely keeping up with my own blog? My creative writing is definitely suffering.
I haven’t even discussed everything that makes a writer terribly busy before they can even tend to their creative writing.
As time goes by, I have found that I am getting closer and closer to my deadline before I can get my blog posts ready to go live, simply because I am running out of time handling life, trying to advance my writing, learning the ins and outs of self-publishing so that I can give my books the best odds, as well as managing the posts, including thinking of a new topic. In fact, with this post, I didn’t make my deadline. I actually got it posted on the correct day but twelve hours after my usual time. It is clear that, for me at least, the situation is untenable.
Before I even wrote this post, I came across another author’s blog. I was curious how they handled their blog, and I love hearing from other authors. What do you think I found? I found a notice stating that the blog was there for anyone to read, but the author was no longer adding new posts. This is the reason they gave: the blog was taking too much time away from their true pursuit, their books.
That was my first indication that this difficulty with keeping up the pace with blog posts was something that others found troublesome as well. It was not just me.
I had also advised a friend who had decided to write a mini-blog. She was trying to follow the advice given on how to make a splash with a blog; post frequently, generally once a week. I advised her to lengthen the time. She settled on every two weeks, and it was still a strain trying to make the suggested word count while making sure the writing was quality.
What I am going to try at this point, is to allow myself to write blog posts when I can, little bits here and there, or get a post done all at once when I have inspiration, but none of it on a deadline. I will add new posts when I add them. No pressure.
The problem is that I don’t want to leave my readers high and dry. It isn’t as though I don’t have a lot of posts on my blog at this time. So, what I am going to try instead is learn how to create and manage a newsletter. Authors are told they should be sending regular emails to their mailing list anyway. I will create blog posts while I learn about how to handle newsletters, then once I launch the newsletter, I will create new posts only when it works with the rest of my writing life. Will the frequency be once a month like the blog posts are currently? It’s possible. It’s also possible, if newsletters are as easy as I’m told, that the frequency might even be every two weeks. Either way, neither my blog nor a newsletter must ever overshadow my main goals, which include my creative writing.
I hope to be able to keep my readers up to date on how this goes. We can call it an experiment.
So, when you are starting a blog, consider how much time and energy it will take away from you and your creative writing. These are limited resources, and, if we are to thrive in our art, we must always make sure we have both the time and the energy to enjoy the wonder.
If you enjoyed this post, please, share this site with others, and give the post a like. If you want to receive further posts directly to your email before they are posted on my site, subscribe. Feel free to leave a comment or make use of the Contact page.
Discover more from Gear and Pen Stories
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.