How to Get Your Book Published in 7000 Easy Steps – A Practical GuideSTEP 9: WHY YOU NEED A BLOG
Dear readers, you cannot imagine how much time and energy I wasted fighting the idea of a blog. Spare yourself this misery and learn from me and just agree to do one. Ironically, thousands of blogs exist out there explaining why writers should have a blog.
But here are the real reasons:
It lets your readers, or potential readers, get the feel of your voice. What you say doesn’t really matter so much. It’s like reading to your child every night. The story itself isn’t so much the important piece, it’s the sound of your voice and the fact that you’re consistently there. And, like when reading to young children, in particular, long stories don’t usually go over so well. Shorter is better. Snuggling in with Watership Down, for example, is not a fav.
It provides some real content. According to my limited observations, much of social media seems to be a vast wasteland where people are clinging on to anything relatively decent and eagerly sharing or retweeting it. If you have or are in the process of opening up several media channels, like a website, a newsletter, Twitter or Facebook (which you should be if you read Step 8), you have to have some content to put in them. Having a blog is a great source of starting material.
Let me predict that at this juncture you’re going to say that you have nothing to blog about, and I know just how you feel, darlings. Not so very long ago, I, too, found myself struggling for a topic and put my poor contact person at the publicist’s through what was I’m sure hell for her, as I would one moment dash off an email in which I refused to get sucked into writing a mindless blog only to capitulate the very next day and send over a potential draft at an embarrassing length of about 2,000 words. With extraordinary patience and tact she would gently inform me that while said tome was certainly interesting, anything that gargantuan would really be considered an essay, at which I laughed. For God’s sake, some of my essays for college lit classes were easily 10,000 words or more!
Slowly she had to reeducate me regarding today’s gnat-size attention spans, the gist of which I will pass along to you.
Here, then, is a handy chart for the modern writer:
*A Good Blog Post = 4 or 500 words
*An Online Magazine Article = 800 words
*Literally Essay = 1500 words
*Short Story = 2,000 words or more
*Average novel these days = 5,000 (just kidding – 80,000. But by the time you read this, it may
have dropped to 70,000 as we continue to grow weaker.)
At this point your superior mind can go either one of two ways: Either despair at the dumbing down of our society or rejoice that you really don’t have to write that much. I mean, really, you can’t muster out a 4 or 500-word post once a week? (Don’t, by the way, go by mine. They’re clearly much too long!)
I know it’s easier said than done, but try to find a topic that perhaps surrounds your book – a companion piece, as it were. Popular topics are, of course: writing, books, relationships and parenting, but I have found that people are also very much drawn to fashion and food. Pick any topic, really, and grow it over time. It gets easier and easier, and even if no one reads it, you’ll become a better writer.
The important thing is to be short, short, short!
And another important thing: forget everything your English teachers taught you about paragraphs.
These days a long sentence can pass for an acceptable paragraph; forget all that about a topic sentence and supporting sentences – that’s terribly old fashioned, darlings.
This is much easier on the eye.
And people will read them.
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STEP 9: WHY YOU NEED A BLOG appeared first on Michelle Cox.
