by Stephanie Morrill
Should all writers blog? Well, like they tell you in school, if a question contains a word like “always, never, all, or none,” the answer is likely, “No.”
A writer emailed me requesting that I write a post on building a blog following. Which I took as a compliment, because it means I must look like I know what I’m doing…
I’m not convinced that I do, but I’ve been blogging for a few years now – both successfully and unsuccessfully – so I’ll share what I’ve learned.
The first blog I ever had was my author blog. I started it a couple months before Me, Just Different released, and the motivations were two-fold:
1. I wanted my publisher to see that I was doing something to promote my book.
2. I had been told that I should have one.
I was smart enough to know I needed to be consistent about posting, so I forced myself to blog 5 days a week every week. I was also smart enough to know that I needed a focus of some sorts … but I could never come up with anything. So I talked about myself a lot – trips to Costco, diapers, etc. – and as a result, I had some extremely faithful readers: my mom, my husband, my mother-in-law, and my friends Roseanna and Kelli.
I knew that my blog was failing, but I didn’t know what to do about it.
After about 8 months of struggling with my author blog, the idea for Go Teen Writers popped into my head. I decided to blog two days a week on Go Teen Writers and keep up my 5 days a week on my author blog. (A choice motivated more by pride than anything else.)
Go Teen Writers grew at a frustratingly slow pace. After about 6 months, it had 17 “followers” and Roseanna and Emii Krii were the only two who ever commented. After a year there were 40, and I was starting to recognize a few more names, like Rachelle, Tonya, and Jazmine. I felt not only frustrated but drained. I was writing 7 blog posts every week, yet I couldn’t seem to gain momentum.
If you blog simply for the joy of blogging then it’s fine to blog about whatever you want, whenever you feel like it. But if you’re wanting your blog to build your exposure, to grow your readership, here are some things I’ve learned in the last 4 years:
This is kind of a weird thing for me to try to explain, but I’ll do my best. When I’m writing book proposals, Go Teen Writers is always in my marketing section. It gets counted as part of my platform. And I’m thankful for that, because it’s nice to be able to put something in that section, as opposed to when I was first writing and my “platform” was based on the variety of writers organizations I pay to be a part of.
But even though Go Teen Writers gets listed in the marketing section, I don’t approach the blog with, “How can I market myself here today? How can I make people want to buy my books?” It’s nice, of course, when people like the blog and because of it buy my books, but that’s not a motivation of mine when I’m creating content or interacting on the Facebook group. Does that make sense at all…?
If something isn’t working – cut your losses and move on
A great additional resource on blogging is from the MacGregor Literary blog. Awhile back, literary agent Amanda Luedeke posted about 7 Ways to Grow Your Blog’s Readership and Blogging as a Fiction Author. I encourage you to read those as well for thoughts on how to title posts and format and all that other good stuff.