I don’t think a blog is usually going to be a great promotional tool. Scalzi’s is, but it’s a decade old–that’s an age of the internet world–and it’s not clear that people who are starting to blog now will ever cast the internet shadow he does. There are a lot more voices crying in that wilderness now.

The stuff I post on my blog is mostly the sort of stuff I would write in my journal, minus the ruminations on specific writing projects and a certain amount of personal angst which wouldn’t be entertaining even to the sort of people who stop and stare at car wrecks. The upside to posting it to a blog is that it’s writing I’d be doing in any case, only this is a way for it to make contact with people, and some interesting conversations result. The downside is the occasional troll, or the more than occasional twinge of “I wish I hadn’t said that”.

Well, some people have indeed proclaimed blogging dead. I’ve heard the rumours that Facebook and Twitter are the wave of the future.

However, I still keep getting an increasing number of views of my MySpace blog. Some people are interested in what this poet/artist is up to. And I’ve made some connections, perhaps tenuous at best but still potentially worthwhile ones, through my blogs on various social netowrks.

I’ve already said some of this over at the SFReader forum, but I’ll say it again here as well. I do not believe the selling of your short-form work stops with an editor’s acceptance anymore than promotion of your novel stops when you sign the publisher’s contract.

I am always trying to find new readers, find potential readers via my blogs that might not otherwise be aware of my work, or the markets publishing my stuff.

Obviously, new writers should concetrate their effort on works for submission. And you do need something to promote before you can promote something. However, I think new writers should make an effort to promote their works. And this may mean keeping a blog.

I think the definition of “blog” is different for many people. I don’t consider my little slice of the Internet a blog, but I guess that’s what it is. The reason I decided to go with Wordpress instead of Blogspot was I had a chance to make it look more like an actual website, with pages and everything else … the “blog” itself is used mostly to update things regarding my work, or stuff I find interesting and think (and hope) somebody else might find interesting as well.

I agree writers should concentrate more on their own writing — both new and old. The Internet has become a kind of sandtrap that sucks hours of your life away, checking OTHER PEOPLE’S BLOGS, while what you really should be doing is writing. In fact, it makes writing all the more difficult, if you think about it.

I know some writers who have a “blog” but don’t update it regularly — again, it’s more for their web presence, so that if anyone happened to read something of theirs and Googled their name, that person should then be able to easily find them … like Jordan said, it becomes a promotional tool.

Facebook and Twitter? Personally I have no interest, though I’d said the same about “blogging” a year ago … I am doing Goodreads, but that just seems to make more sense as I love to read (as I’m sure everyone else reading this does too).

Something else to keep in mind — I remember reading someplace how an agent had stumbled across something a writer had written (or maybe they had gotten a query and sample chapters but the author had forgotten to add their contact info) and that agent had then tried Googling them and searching everywhere for them … but that author was never found. Again, if he or she had had some kind of web presence, they might have signed with that agent and … well, you can figure out the rest.

So in conclusion (sorry for writing so much), I don’t see having a blog a bad thing for new or old writers, just so they realize that the important thing is that readers and editors care about a great story or novel, not a great blog.

(P.S. Scott Sigler is another writer who used his web presence to his advantage, snagging a book deal with an imprint of Random House.)

David,

Your blog is simply stunning in its treatment of poetry. Very professional.

You mention Facebook, Blogger, etc. That just compounds the problem. Writers need to chose ONE avenue to focus on. The decision should be simply–the one that nets the most potential readers. If that’s Facebook, then they should concentrate their efforts there.

It’s true about the archived forever bit. Google “caches” pages, so even if I were to, say, delete your comment here on Without Really Trying, a reader could still find it by clicking that “view cached page” link on Google.

Very funny.