Blog: How to Blog
Wow, I’m suddenly into meta blogs here, and it’s totally unintentional, honestly. But as I’m sitting here thinking about the launch of my new series, the Children of Avalon, I’m also trying to come up with blogs to write for the blog tour I’m going to be doing in May, after the third book in the trilogy comes out.
Not only do I need to think about what I’ve got to write about, but how I’m going to write it. Yes, there is an art, a craft to writing a blog. It’s taken me a few years of both writing and reading blogs to figure this out, and I’m still not sure I’ve got it down, but I try.
The key to writing an easy to read, interesting blog post is, I think summed up very well in Anne R Allen’s blog this week—skimmable.
As a writer this kind of makes me sad. I’m vain enough to not want people to skim through my writing. I want readers to thoroughly read what I write, but in both today’s busy world and this particular genre of writing, that’s really not a reasonable request. I realize and acknowledge this. So the trick to writing a good blog, it seems, is to write something that people don’t actually have to read every word of:
• Have short, frequent paragraphs. They’re easy to zip through.
• Use bullet points where ever possible. It’s not something I do a lot because my writing doesn’t usually lend itself to bullets, but I’ll try to see if I can’t do it more often.
• Put yourself into your post– make it personal and written with your own distinctive voice. All of you who’ve been reading my blog for a while now know just how I sound. You know how I write—lots of asides either separated by dashes or parenthesis, right? But this is me. It’s my voice. You need to write in your voice, whatever and however it may be.
• And the last point which scares me the most regarding this blog tour—know what the blog you’re writing for is about, what the readers of it expect when they go there. So you need to both read the blog and know who else is reading it and then write for them, to meet their expectations.
For example, if I’m going to write for a blog about writing, I’m going to write something about how I wrote my book (you know, the one I’m selling, the reason I’m on the blog in the first place). If the blog is aimed at readers of history, I need to write something about the historical time period in which tithe book is set. A completely different blog! If I don’t know for whom, I’m writing, how can I possibly know what to write. So I expect that the company I’m using to organize this blog tour for me will give me the list of blogs where I’ll be guest posting so I can read them first, and get an idea of what to write. Yes, I’ll go in with a few generic guest posts in my pocket, but still, I will tailor my posts to the blog.
So, what about you? Have you blogged? Guest blogged? When you did, did you do your due diligence first, ie, how did you prepare?
