Can You Judge an Author's Fiction By Their Blog?

Sometimes I look back at old blog posts and find things that make me flinch. I've been doing this for a long time, which hopefully comes with some improvement, but I know I still have plenty of typos, grammar faux-pas and run-on sentences in my posts. My brain definitely knows the their/there/they're rule, but sometimes my hands don't. (And I admit, I didn't get the title for this post right the first time around).

Basically I just sometimes wonder, can mistakes on an authors blog be enough of a deterrent that people don't buy their books? (Got that "their" right the first time, btw).

In thinking about this I've been thinking about sort of the two ends of the blog quality spectrum.

On the one hand, there are some blogs out there of such poor quality that they're almost illegible. This is beyond spelling and grammar errors, this is confusing wording and very poor structure, so much so that you're not sure what exactly the blogger is even trying to say. Now, it seems like blogs like this would be an absolute deterrent, but in thinking about it, I actually don't think even that would be an authors final chance. Yes, it may take extra motivation for me to make the effort to go from such a blog to the authors books on Amazon, let's say, but I might--and the key here is free sample. For a blog like this, I definitely would not go from the blog to spending money. However I am not past being won over if and that's a HUGE if, they motivate me enough to spend the effort downloading a free sample to my iPad, which I would do with a very skeptical and wary eye. So not good chances, but still not last chances.

On the other hand are the types of bloggers we all aspire to be. These are the blogs we find, read one post and know already that it's worth our time to subscribe. The blogger continues to produce such valuable content that we come back consistently and eventually decide to put down effort and maybe even money towards their books. A sample often still comes first for ebooks (which is another reason why your first few chapters are crucial). But for the readers of a fabulous blog, there's not a lot of begging and convincing that needs to be done. The other thing I've noticed about this is that the blogs that are for me in this category are there not because of beautiful, poetic language (although they write very well). I pay attention to them because of consistent, relevant, and very well-organized content. That's a lesson we can take into account for our novels too.

We also need to take into account the fact that our novels undergo a much more intensive editing process (one would hope) than our blog posts do.

What do you think? Can you judge an author's fiction by their blog? Have you bought or not bought a writers book based on their blog?

Sarah Allen