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.

Richard, I agree that it’s nice to get new readers through a blog, but think pragmatic for a minute. Pay yourself for your blogging/forum surfing out of your writing earning. What’s your hourly rate? Mine, I suppose would be under a penny an hour. I’d spit on an employer that offered me that rate.

Bill, As usual, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. I blog because of the hook that I have, I feel I can attract readers who have never heard of me, but also as a kind of knowledge base. Posts that describe my daily life will be rare; most of my posts will describe writing break throughs.

Robert, my sentiments exactly. Blogging’s fine, so long as it never interferes with your writing time.

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.)

I never intended to blog but, since I was using blog software for my site, I sort of backed into it. I look at it not as a way to get a lot of attention, but maybe a way to keep what little attention I do get.

Plus, it is something like an online resume, and editor’s do look at these things (at least, I did). If you are prepared to put some content on the site it can lead to some other writing gigs — I’ll have six book reviews in the BG, purely because my blog reviews demonstrated what I could do.

A simple, clean website should do for anyone up until they sell that first novel, but there are some writing opportunities that blogging can open for you if you happen to be interested in other things — in my opinion it basically comes down to whether you are prepared to blog about more than just yourself.

As far as Facebook and Twitter being the wave of the future — I have no doubt they can reach bigger audiences, but do they actually build a relationship between writer and reader? They seem so superficial. I wouldn’t ignore them, but I don’t see them doing for even a beginning writer what a decent blog could do in terms of holding someone’s attention.

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.