Blasting into the Blogosphere
by Diana Jenkins
The internet has had a profound impact on the business and practice of being a writer. I often think that so many things in life and art come down to timing, and I can’t help wonder if my own is always doomed to be just a little bit…well, off. In real life, I strive for punctuality, and my husband’s lax attitude around all things temporal is the source of more arguments and bloody thoughts than can be healthy, but in the virtual world I always seem to arrive after the boat has pulled out to sea.
One voyage for which I found myself at the check-in desk a little in advance of the final boarding call was back when I sailed out into the blogosphere, all wide-eyed and clueless. Sure, Wordpress had already registered millions of blog names by the time I added mine, but in September 2006, when I launched DoctorDi, I didn’t really know any other bloggers and I didn’t have a clue in the world about what I was doing.
Fast-forward to just over 6 years later, and I effectively decommissioned DoctorDi, exiting the blogosphere suffering from acute blog fatigue and a case of the World Wide Wearies that lingers to this day. But blogging was a useful, interesting, surprising and personally rewarding vehicle for my writing for longer than many contemporary marriages last, so this month I want to revisit the blogosphere, share what I learned from and came to believe about blogging, and invite Varuna Alumni to comment about and link through to your own blogs and/or personal favourites in the field.
Here’s just a few of the things I think worth considering if you’re flirting with the idea of launching a blog:
Blogs take time
They take time to maintain and they take time to find any sort of audience. The second one matters less in some ways than the first, because there’s simply no point undertaking a blog in the first place unless you have the time and energy to regularly contribute fresh posts. I began blogging as a means of maintaining the discipline of production: I wrote every weekday for much of the blog’s life. It was a statement of intent at a time when I had only recently started writing professionally and probably still had to prove to myself and my husband that I was, in fact, a writer, and when left to my own devices, I would, in fact, write.
But blogs take time. What started as a daily demonstration of my compulsive need to generate words on a page became a serious distraction from the writing I most wanted to be doing: fiction. Instead of working on my manuscript whenever lulls in freelance commissions allowed, I was writing blog posts instead. And reading them.
Which brings me to the other time-consuming element that sometimes overtook whole days: I spent an inordinate amount of time religiously reading the blogs of the blogging friends who religiously read mine. We were all in it together, which was absolutely marvellous, but also really quite demanding from a time management perspective. I didn’t want to lose my blogging friends when I stopped blogging, but personally I found I had to stop not only generating blog posts but reading them as well. Especially once my son was born – and I struggled on for two more years writing increasingly sporadic posts – I just didn’t have the luxury of sufficient time to keep it up.
Some people are able to juggle all of these separate demands: work, family, domestic chores, endless admin, health, creative output, friends, hobbies, assorted life commitments and blogging. I cannot. Ultimately, as a reader and writer operating in the blogosphere, I decided that continuing would be at the expense of other writing and reading I already felt I had too little time to do. It was a terrible wrench. Two years later I still feel awful for dropping off the comments stream of my blogging friends’ posts. I think of them all the time, but a couple of weeks ago, I was prompted to do the rounds and say g’day and catch up on all they’ve been writing and guess what happened? It took ALL DAY. All. Day. And it all came back to me in a rush: I do not have time for this if I am ever going to get any worthwhile fiction written. I wish I were one of those people who manages to do everything, but I’m not. I know that now and it was a really salutary reminder when I got to the end of the day without writing one single word beyond apologetic, borderline pathetic and entirely bloodless comments on all my blogging friends’ blogs. Danger, danger, Will Robinson, danger.
Time. Can you afford to spend it in the blogosphere?Blogs forge friendships
I was always surprised when anyone read one of my posts and never stopped being absolutely delighted when some people – in time I had a core dedicated readership of about 6-8 commentators and about 25 silent regulars – began making a point of reading and commenting upon each new post. It was a thrill each and every time, because those 6-8 readers – who became valued friends – were all around the world and it was only the internet and blogging that enabled us to find each other. When we were in London in the summer of 2012, one of my blogging friends, Litlove from Tales from the Reading Room, caught the train down from Cambridge to come and have lunch with me. Meeting her in person was so totally normal and unsurprising and fantastic that I just thought, “Oh yes, of course – it’s you!”
You do know each other, that’s the weird thing. In some cases you know each other really well even though you’ve never met face to face. It’s a very powerful and for me wholly unexpected benefit of blogging: lifelong connections are possible. And you can’t put a price on that.Blogs are a phenomenal archive
I blogged through some major life events: my nana’s slow descent into Alzheimer’s and permanent care; IVF, pregnancy and the first two years of parenting; my fiction manuscript’s long and troubled evolution. It’s all there. My life. Six years of it. I lamented to my husband only a day or so ago that it’s a bit of a tragedy that this second IVF pregnancy and the journey that preceded it has gone almost wholly unrecorded. I think it’s wonderful for me (and hopefully one day for my son, who’s now approaching 4) that at the time, I wrote so much about my pregnancy with him and the first couple of years of his life. Now a second baby is soon to arrive, I can’t help feeling really sad that no such daily diary exists for the coming child to read later and see how much he or she was wanted and just what our lives are like, today, before he or she properly arrives to turn everything upside down. It makes me feel a bit like howling that the words aren’t there because I didn’t write them this time around.
The blog was such an obvious avenue for such writing and although I was a diary keeper for many, many years before taking up blogging, they’re very different, and in any case since abandoning the blog I have not really returned to a traditional diary. I just haven’t been writing anything down about life at all. In fairness, this has been my busiest year both as a parent and as a freelance journalist, so buggered if I know when I would have done all this life writing, but it’s still true that blogging encouraged creating a record that I’m so pleased exists today.Blogs that succeed are specific
If ever I were considering re-entering the blogosphere at some point in the future, it would be with a blog about one thing. Books, art, cooking, parenting, politics, running, architecture, theatre, fashion, design, travel: whatever it was, it would be about that and that alone. My blog suffered, I think, from being about all sorts of things – it was really just about me, my life, things I found interesting or funny or harrowing or diverting from one day to the next. It wasn’t at all the same as keeping a diary, my posts do not resemble anything I have ever written in diary form, but it was as changeable and personal as diaries can sometimes be. And if you are eyeing off the blogosphere with a view to growing a readership and possibly even cultivating future commercial viability, I think it improves your chances if your blog has an explicit reason for being and you are crystal clear on exactly what it’s about.Blogs make sense for authors
Author pages and blogs are important marketing tools for today’s authors. If you have a novel coming out, you’re probably doing yourself and your work a disservice if you don’t have an online presence. People will look for you, and you should be easy to find. Some writers feel uneasy and worse about the prospect of constructing and maintaining a public profile on the web, but this is one of those timing issues we simply can’t do much about. We’re not living in the 19th century, we’re living now.
I’m sure it’s weirdly intrusive discovering you’re ‘Google-able’ if you’ve done nothing to court the all-seeing eye, and personally I really value my privacy – despite my history of public disclosures – but the web isn’t really a space most authors can afford to ignore if they want to find and keep readers. Okay, if you’ve written the surprise bestseller of the year, you probably don’t need to create and manage an author site to promote yourself and your work, but if you’re shifting more modest numbers, you probably do. Mid-range authors are the rule, not the exception, and blogs give you another tool for engaging readers.
There are excellent examples among the Varuna Alumni – including Charlotte Wood’s How to Shuck an Oyster, a personal favourite – so please, please don’t be shy, please do use the comment feed to tell us about your blog if you have one. I’ll get the ball rolling. I am constantly inspired by my friend and Varuna Alumna Jennifer Scoullar, who’s now a best-selling rural romance author whom I first met in 2008 at my first Varuna residency. Her website and blog really serve her fan-base as much as they promote Jenny’s novels. Again, it knows what it’s about: all things ‘RuRo.’ Jenny talks about conferences, fellow RuRo writers, RuRo book launches, her latest manuscript, her inspirations… Jenny’s blog makes sense because her posts are always in context, and that makes it really easy for readers to find her and to keep coming back. It’s a reliable anchor for rural romance readers in a vast, roiling, limitless ocean – and that can only be a good thing.
I recommend investing in the creation of author pages and blogs with a crucial caveat suggested by my first point, which is that blogging takes time. If you can manage the time investment so that it doesn’t unduly intrude on the primary business of whatever core writing you do, then bombs away and I salute you. But if you’re like me, a hopeless juggler who always gets sucked into the vortex, you may want to set up an author page without a blogging component, so that you can promote your book/s without committing yourself to writing regular blog posts. Personally I think you’re better off avoiding a blog entirely rather than having one that clearly isn’t getting any love. No one likes visiting a dead garden. And good luck if you do decide to take the plunge. I hope you’ll feel heartened by the main thing I learned from blogging, which is that there’s a pretty warm welcome waiting out there.