Blogging and You: Why Do It

Thank you all for your response to Kevin’s question. I’m going to break things down into a few different categories and we can take the discussion from there. In what will probably be a several post piece, let’s start with the basics:

Why Blog in the First Place?

“I think the primary benefit of my blog is for keeping the existing readers fired up to go spread word of mouth.” Shanna Swendson

You’ve written the book, made a contract with the publisher, and survived the editing process, but your job still isn’t done. To counteract the ever decreasing marketing budgets at the publishing houses, you’ve got a find a way to grow your readership and keep them coming back—whether it is for the next book in a series, or a new book all together. Blogs can create that direct sense of connection between writer and reader, and they cost nothing to create. Well, nothing except time, effort and creativity…but we’ll get to those in a minute.

First let’s focus on what a blog lets an author do:

• Connect with readers by sharing their thoughts on the book process, the characters and proving they’re just like everyone else (Authors! They’re just like us! A new feature to found in the writer’s version of US Weekly).**
• Create an up-to-date presence on the internet that with tagging can increase your presence to the Google algorithm (given that 60% of the population uses Google as their first choice search engine, this is a good thing).
• Offer up advance excerpts, answer reader questions, and let readers know when the next book is coming out without waiting for your webmaster to update a website. Just write and hit post.
• Talk about other books that are similar that the author like, or direct the readership to other authors of note.
• Connect with other authors, direct readers to advance reviews, and network, network, network!

A successful author blog creates a community led by the author that allows readers to connect and builds on the loyalty of the readers. As Kalika said, “it makes authors seem less like strangers and more like people I know, so I'm more likely to want to buy their books instead of borrowing them from a friend or the library.” This loyalty and excitement from the blog transfers to readers going out to the bookstore to find the book or jumping on one of the online sites to make their purchase. Then on their own blogs, or in conversations with store patrons or friends, this reader will spread the word about this author’s work. The sales might not be able to be traced directly back to the author’s blog, but it acts as a strong link in the chain that gets people to read your books.

Author as Essayist?

One of Kevin’s points with this question (which I didn’t include, but he thankfully reiterated in the comments section) is that not everyone has what it takes to be a successful blogger—one who “can take the mundane or the complicated and make it interesting, funny, and readable. But that in itself is a particular writing talent, and not every writer will be good at doing that as opposed to their normal mode of writing.”

Back in February, I asked why people read any blogs at all in “Writer as Blogger, Blogger as Writer.” The answers I received cited Voice and Content as the two biggest reasons for following a blog. These two things working alone and together accounted for the loyalty most readers felt towards the blogs they followed. In many cases people cited finding a blog looking for some sort of content, and sticking with it for the voice.

But how does this affect an author’s blog when taking into account Kevin’s definition of a successful blogger?

Voice

Just as the acquisitions editor must consider the voice of your manuscript when deciding whether or not to purchase it, so does the passing reader when they decide whether or not to make a commitment to your blog. This voice is especially important for the fiction (as opposed to nonfiction writers) writer as you can’t always rely on content to bring new readers to your blog. Links from other authors might drive people there, but it is the voice you bring to the blog that keeps new readers there and old readers coming back regularly.

Blogging, with all its informality and immediacy, creates a sense of closeness between author and reader that you can foster with the tone or voice that you use for each post. By assuming an approachable style, you invite the reader to put aside their shyness and interact. Narrative prose, however, often differs from how a writer might sound in a conversation. I write this blog in the same way I would converse with a friend in real life (to the point that back when I was anonymous a friend warned me that anyone who knew me and read Bookseller Chick would know the identity of the writer immediately). This blog voice shares little to no resemblance to any fiction writing I’ve done, which is fine as I’m not attempting to use this as a forum to promote myself as a writer of fiction.*

If the voice of your blog sounds nothing like your narrative writing, that’s fine. It’s you, the author, conversing with your readers, not your characters. There’s a hidden danger that comes from sounding too much like your prose. I’ve come across many a reader complaining that they can’t think of the character as their own entity because the voice they know from the author’s blog intrudes too much in the narrative. These people may represent a small portion of your readership, but it is something you should be aware of in your blogging and writing.

Although the reverse is also true, as Random Ranter states, “Blogs give me a chance to get to know a person's writing style before I plunk down my bucks.” Finding out that the author who writes humorous little essays about his/her cats, actually writes gore filled books with dark plots may throw a new reader off.

Given this “damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” how do you walk the fine line in between?

Well, that’s where content comes in.

Content

As an author, you have to decide what your blog is going to be to you. The best author blogs cover topics that both the author and the reader care about. As Lectitans states in her response to the “Writer as Blogger, Blogger as Writer” column, “The best blogs are conversations. I don't want to read a blog where the blogger writes only what she thinks her readers want without putting any of herself into it. That kind of writing is dishonest and uninteresting. Still, I don't care to read a lot of navel-gazing. A blogger should be aware of her audience and keep them in mind without giving herself over to them completely.”

When blogging, ask yourself: what are you blogging about? And why are you blogging about it? If the majority of your blogging is just to have a place for a personal diary with no relation to your writing, perhaps blogging isn’t the way to go. Same goes if you are just blogging by rote, and don’t really have any interest in the topics you’re covering. The content of your blog is strongest when it is a balance of what appeals to you and what appeals to your readers.

I draw a lot of people to this blog due to content. People searching for different authors, bookseller opinions, books, etc, stop by thanks to this search engine or that. Sometimes they like what they read and stay (or search more), and sometimes they move on, which fits with the nature of this blog and what it has become. The ongoing “mission” of this blog has changed multiple times over its lifetime, but one thing remains consistent: I write about topics that interest me and they are ones that I hope interest you as well.

As an author, you’ve got a built in hook with your blog readership as they want to find out about your books. Don’t be afraid to post excerpts and answer questions readers pose about this character or that. It may lead you to other areas of interest to write on and will also help you create content to reuse on your website (for example: questions from readers about certain characters can be collected and turned into a Q&A for their books).

Content Meets Voice and Produces Comment Babies

In my mind, the ideal mixing of content and voice happen when an author takes a general topic of interest and finds a way to approach it through an example from their own experience. Everyone may have outlined the publishing process, done a signing, gone to a con, worked with a writer’s group, or been called by their agent about a deal, but how an author tells their own story on this subject is what makes it unique. The factual content may remain the same, but the little details, the emotional journey, etc are what makes the author’s telling unique. It’s what makes your blog different from so-in-sos blog.

It’s what makes your book different from the others on the shelf.

Connecting content with voice makes a blog approachable and will bring people back. Balance those topics that seem more authorial navel-gazing with those directed straight at the reader, and your readers will let you get away with a little “me-time” introspection.

(Oh, and try to keep all of that shorter than this blog post has turned out.)

Your Thoughts

Agree? Disagree? Never made it to the end because the length made you fast forward to the end?

Bring on the discussion, and while you do so, keep these questions in mind as well:

How do you avoid only writing about the mundane? And can you get away with using your prose/character voice on your blog?

*Although the two people who visit this place who’ve actually read anything I’ve written can feel free to argue this point.

**In proving approachable via a blog, you are offering up validation to your readers. According to eight million websites I have found (who give no straight answer to where this information comes from), a 2005 survey found that 82% of Americans feel they should/could write a book. By appearing like a normal person you validate the idea that they too can write a book as well. I do believe that this correlates into more book sales.

SB Day: The Guy Edition (Part Two)

(This is continued from SB Day: The Guy Edition (Part One), and will only make sense in order.)

It’s A Boy Thing

My mother, having gotten rather retrospective in the last few months, blames herself for my brother’s lack of reading love. She feels she may have shorted him by trying so hard to be the perfect wife and mother. When there was just me, there was time to sluff off the cooking and cleaning in favor of making mud pies and reading books, but with two children (one of whom already had a set schedule) and the doubling of her workload she feels he didn’t get the same one on one attention I did. “Of course, he had you,” she’s always quick to point out, but we both know that he wasn’t the object of my sole attention either. Very few things, other than My Little Ponies, are to a four year old, and there is no reason he should have been. So while at age three I’d memorized entire books because they’d been repeated to me over and over again, my brother (at the same age) was entertaining himself with cars and army men.

My parents did not set out to short change my brother, nor do I think they did. Had his schooling been the same level that I experienced, had he had someone to come in and read with him daily in the classroom, then whether or not he’d memorized Cinderella at age three would be a non-issue. This wasn’t the case, and hasn’t been for most kids in public school. With classroom sizes getting larger, volunteer programs getting cut back, and a general dumbing down of education, kids like my brother fall through the cracks every day. And I fully believe more of them are male than female.

Again and again the gender bias of women as readers and men as doers is reinforced despite the fact that generations before this one produced male readers a plenty. If a boy consistently chooses anything (sports, outdoors, video games) over reading its simply considered a masculine trait. Boys who choose reading over these things are considered peculiar, while a girl who would rather read then play soccer won’t find much resistance. It’s a double standard that I’m aware that even I perpetuate. As much as it pisses me off to hear a mother or father say there son is not a reader because “he’s a boy,” I find myself worrying that the little boy who loves books to the point of fanaticism. Does he get outside enough? Does he have other interests besides reading to talk about with his friends?

And the most insidious thought of all, “Does he not have friends to play with?”

How could I, a semi well-rounded person and acknowledged bibliophile, even think that? I know it is quite possible to be a reader and have a fulfilling social life. I know that wanting to talk about books with your friends and being unable to is a sign of education failing those other kids, not a detriment to the boy who loves to read. I know all of this, and yet the thought is there because over and over again the image we’re presented of the bookish male is one of a skinny, pale fellow who is not in touch with the real world. A similar stereotype can (and is) applied to female readers, but in a more joking and accepted manner. Rarely does a friend or relative follow up your, “Oh, my daughter, she always has her head stuck in a book,” with a, “Why? Doesn’t she have any friends?”

Please Read the Parental Advisory Label

Boys, like my brother, see reading as work, not escape, because they are never taught to enjoyment. With an education system that will only pay attention to them if they act out or are at the top of their class, they skate along by learning just as much as they have to, or are able to without help. The disconnect grows with parents who aren’t aware of where their kids really are education-wise (or mistakenly believe they are receiving the same education as those who came before), and don’t have time to provide the one on one attention that their children need.

There isn’t time to read to them when you have to get dinner ready, so why shouldn’t they play that video game.

It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t like to read, he is a boy, and there are so many distractions these days.

The excuses are many and varied and perpetuated time and again by parents and teachers who don’t realize what they are doing. They don’t have time to instill the love of reading, and therefore pass the buck in believing that someone else is taking up the job. The overworked parents believe the teachers are doing it, and the overworked teachers think the parents aren’t doing their job. In the end, the gender bias when it comes to male readers sets in, and everyone walks away believing that little Joey or Simon just wasn’t cut out to be a reader anyway, but gee, he sure likes baseball or basketball where he gets one on one attention from not only his coach, but also his teammates. It’s not like reading is a team sport, anyway.

Slightly Off-Topic, But Since I’m Ranting Anyway

In her comments on Part One of this essay, Robin said, “I also think there are simply more books aimed at girls than at boys.” This is something I would agree with, but for this simple problem. Teachers, in attempt to lure those reluctant boy readers, often seem to choose books with male protagonists to be read in the classrooms. Time and again, I’ve worked with a teacher to pick out books for her classroom, only to have her say, “Oh, we can’t read that. My boys won’t identify with a female protagonist.”

It’s never a question whether or not the girls will identify with a strong, male protagonist. No one has ever wondered aloud within my hearing whether or not the girls will be left out because we’re reading a “boy” book. It’s simply accepted that the girls are already readers and that they don’t differentiate either way. The girls buy their “girl” books on the off time, or seek them out at the library. When they grow up, these girls will be just as likely to pick up a “boy” book as they will a “girl” book, while the boys who occasionally read might find a “girl” book too feminine as if that were a bad thing. Maybe these very same boys would have benefited in reading about a strong female character that they could respect and admire. Maybe they, as Joss Whedon talks about in his Equality Now speech, these very same boys could have identified something in that female character within themselves, that in a male character would have been skipped over or considered “girlish.”

Boy Meets Girl. Boy And Girl Read A Book.

Do we need more books like Harry Potter that celebrates strong male and female characters as well as cooperation and learning to be read in the classroom? Hell to the yes.

Do we need an education system that shores up these cracks that children fall through, funds smaller classrooms and has more volunteers on staff? Yes.

Are we going to get these things? Probably not anytime soon, and this places even more pressure on the two parents trying to work two or more jobs to achieve the American dream.

Are there always going to be some people who would rather do something other than spend their time reading? Yes, some people are just wired differently, but there is no excuse why they shouldn’t understand why reading can be enjoyable or why they should go through their entire lives without being touched by a book.

Reading is a tool, a pleasure, an escape and a teacher. Reading teaches about the past even as it lets us imagine the future. Everyone, boy or girl, should have the opportunity to experience this. Creating a reader could be as easy as reading to your child at night, putting on an audio book in the car instead of letting them play with their hand-helds, or inviting writers into your classroom to talk (and read) to your students. Reading is everywhere, and a necessary fact of life, so why shouldn’t also be viewed as a necessary escape from life. Blaming the rise of electronics for falling readership is too easy and blaming overwhelmed teachers too simplistic, we all need to accept that we play a role in that little boy not reading, even if it just by letting someone get away with the “he’s a boy” excuse.

If he likes books about snakes and slugs, then get him books about snakes and slugs; they’re out there. If he likes the movie version of Hoot or Holes, not only get him those books, but offer him options that are similar. If changing the freaking advertisement world to better represent male shoppers a la the Business Week article is necessary, then bring it on.

Support him as a reader; don’t let him fall through the cracks. Because there is nothing worse, as bookseller, hearing anyone from a little boy to a full-grown man in a suit say, “I don’t enjoy reading, it’s boring.” Especially when you know it only takes one book to spark their interest.

You just have to get them to pick it up.

SB Day: The Guy Edition (Part One)

On this Smart Bitches Day I think we should give some thought to men. Male readers that is. AOL has an article up from Business Week Online about the secrets of the male shopper, apparently advertisers have been missing up to one half of the male buying public in their campaign to get us to all spend, spend, spend! Whether new selling tactics can be applied to draw in this other half of male shoppers and turn in them into readers, I don’t know. The politics and gender biases (when it comes to male readers) start so young that I’m not sure a simple change in advertising would make a difference.

At Least He’s Reading

Over and over again in my years of bookselling, I’ve heard the same refrain from mothers about their sons: “At least he’s reading.”

I hear it when they hand over ten dollars for the latest Naruto manga or car magazine. I hear it even as they make a face at the Star Wars tie in or any book that does not have the award of approval glittering on its surface. Even as they praise the child for trying, they denigrate his reading choices. The subtext is clear, “Thank God he’s reading, but does he have to be reading that?”

First of all, there is no “at least” about it. Reading, even if it advertisements on a cereal box or the articles in Playboy, is reading. You are actively engaged in comprehending the meaning of words and how they affect the meaning of a sentence. You are absorbing sentence structure and word choice and you might even be learning a thing or two.

Yes, some writing might be less complex than others, but complex does not necessarily mean better. The Da Vinci Code might not have been top rate literature, but it managed to get a lot of people—specifically in this instance male people—to enjoy a book where previous they found reading for pleasure an oxymoron. For some of these people the Da Vinci Code acted like a gateway drug to other books, ones with more complex structures or mysteries. Suddenly these guys who before might have simply played a video game or watched television found they could enjoy the written word and discovered that it could be just as exciting as a visual stimulus.

But why did they lose this ability in the first place?

He’s Just Not a Reader

Time and again this scenario plays out the same: a mother enters the store with her two children, a boy and a girl. The girl heads to one fiction section or another with the mom, while the boy loiters around the video game magazines. Mom and daughter will eventually wander back up to the counter with a stack of books, complaining that they would have found more, but the boy has expressed his boredom and wants to leave. Why is he bored?

“Well, he’s just not a reader.”

Why not? Is this just a male thing? Surely not. Every day half of my customers are business men buying business books, fiction, or Scifi; men in their forties or older who enjoy the written word and what it can teach them. I have men in their sixties and seventies stopping in to buy books while their wives shop, so they have something to do while sitting on the bench out in the mall. My own father, while not much of a fiction reader, sits down with the newspaper every day and has been known to be irrational fond of fact books (like the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series).

Maybe it’s a generational thing. My brother dislikes reading except for the occasional magazine (or Bathroom Reader, it’s an addiction—this thirst for trivial facts). To my knowledge, his only voluntary book reading has been with the Harry Potter series, and even then he stopped at book five and has shown no interest in continuing. Part of this may stem from the fact that he learned to read late. In third grade we learned he was reading at barely a first grade level and that his teachers didn’t notice because he wasn’t a problem child. This could have been my fate as well had I not had so much one on one reading time as a child: being the first born I benefited from my mother’s full attention, I went to a co-op kindergarten that was heavily reading based, and I had an excellent volunteer in my grade school who spent time reading with individual children each day. Basically I was given the best of that reading and reading comprehension teaching had to offer.

My brother didn’t experience any of this, and when his reading problem was discovered everyone blamed it on development issues instead of falling through the educational cracks. He had hand/eye tracking problems (something my mother realized was bull shit when she looked at how well he preformed with video games and sports) we were told. He just needs tutoring that needs to be paid for out of pocket and on his own time. Reading became something he had to work out, something he was told he was not good at.

Reading became the enemy because it was hard and it was work. Reading for enjoyment did not exist for my bro, it was something he had to do so that he could later play video games or go outside and play. The concept of choosing a book over Mario or taking one along with him into the fields did not occur to him, even though this was something that he saw my mother and I do constantly. Obviously he observed that we got enjoyment out of the process, but he that didn’t mean he wanted to give it a try.

Why?


The rant continued in SB Day: The Guy Edition (Part Two).

Reader Loyalty

As many of you admitted yesterday on “Use Me, Abuse Me” we all have authors we just keep going back to despite our disappointment. This has led me to try to figure out why, only realize the answer is part of a much larger question, “What creates a loyal reader?”

Let’s face it, every one of our favorite authors probably has a book we like slightly less than the rest. Sometimes this is because it truly is a weaker book, while other times it may be due to changes in writing style, a different editor, a rushed deadline or some other factor. More often than not, this is the book we don’t reread, it’s the one we give away to our friends or trade in at the used bookshop, but it doesn’t stop us from buying the next novel (though it might make us hesitate).

The novel may not be weaker at all, but a departure from the author’s established genre to one where many fans don’t wish to follow. I can’t count the number of times that an author has switched genres and I, as a bookseller, hear about it. Often reader loyalty will bring them to pick up this new book, only to be disappointed by the radical changes the author has made to fit his/her plotline into this new arena.

Is our ability to forgive based on the strength of an author’s backlist? Are we more likely to forgive an author that slumps on the fourth book than on his/her sophomore effort? Will the placement of the slump dictate whether this author is still bought in hardback, paperback, or checked out from the library? And what makes us go back at all, why not quit cold turkey?

Going cold turkey would mean (to me at least) we thought the author was irredeemable. If my abusive author/reader relationship of choice could be proved irredeemable, I would walk away and never look back, but much like cigarettes there are defined addicted qualities that reel me back in:

• The books represent a calming influence during a point of upheaval: We all have books that we read when we are stressed out or feeling depressed that offer the escape we need. It is only later, when our emotions have settled and we try to reread them that we realize these books are not the GREATEST. THING. EVER, but do, in fact, suck donkey balls. Bring back that stress, however, and you’ll go crawling back to that author faster than you can book a therapy session.

• The book represents disappointed potential: Once upon a time I “volunteered” to be a teacher’s assistant for a class of college freshmen and reading their first essays had to be one of the most painful experiences of my life. This was not because they were all bad (although some had me wondering if maybe mom or dad had written their kid’s entrance essay), but because no one seemed to know how to trim the fat. Underneath the layers of repetition and hanging threads were some great ideas just waiting to bust free, but it took a lot of slash and burn editing to get to them. This potential is the same thing I recognize in the authors I keep going back to, whether it is in the plot, characterizations, writing style or all of the above. It’s why I keep picking up the next book with the hope that it will be better, that an editor or the writer will have gotten ruthless, taken a page from Carver (just a page, not a whole book which can be a bitch to handle at times), and did a little showing instead of telling.

• Disappointed Potential Redux or “the first few books were great and then…:” You’re following a series and it is great, wonderful, stu-fucking-pendous. You can’t wait to tell your family, friends, neighbors and book group about it. Then the fourth or fifth book comes out and that worshipful love starts to dim. The plot has started to repeat itself, characters are acting differently without precedent, villains are brought back from the dead for no apparent reason, and there is no end in sight. But you love this series and you’ve been following it for years. You have to know how it ends because each story has advanced the overarching plot. Besides, s/he has to finish the books soon, right?

I’m sure there are many more reasons we go back, or different nuances to the ones I’ve posted above. And we all have our own limitations, the point where we say enough is enough and never look back. Still, I have to wonder what influences that decision and how much we are willing to forgive and forget. If you knew that an author was going through a hard time in their personal life would you be happy that even managed to put out a book (despite the fact that it wasn’t up to previous standards) or would you wish they had waited? Would you have stayed loyal during that wait or moved on and forgotten the author’s name?

The questions are endless, but I would love to read your thoughts on those already posed, as well as any you come up with.