Blog off - Karen Bush

What's the point of blogging?
As others here have pointed out, strenuously blogging and Facebooking your book and/or yourself doesn't necessarily result in attracting new readers or produce much by way of increased sales. 
Halloween countdown ...
Christmas countdown ...
I nearly pulled a muscle in my brain thinking up things to post on the FB page for Haunting Hounds each day during October last year, counting down to Halloween. And then did it all over again for December, producing an Advent Calendar countdown to Christmas (another traditional time for telling spooky tales).  And then let off steam by adding a 12 Days of Christmas countdown (or count up) too.  The people that saw the posts seemed to quite like them and they got shared about, but it didn't crank sales up by more than a few copies. It's a shame as my share of the profits all go to Scruples Whippet Rescue ...
12 days of Christmas ...
Blogging and FB-ing can be pretty time-consuming: time that might perhaps be better spent actually getting on with writing books. Yet here I am, putting up yet another blog and FB page, this time about dog friendly gardening - why am I doing it? What is the point if it's not actually helping to sell books?
Well, there's always the possibility that they will.
But even if they don't, for me at any rate, blogging and FB-ing is not just about doing a bit of PR. It is, I find, a good way of getting started on the real business of the day, the actual putting down of book words. Sometimes you can't wait to dive in to your WIP, but there are also those days when it's hard to get going. And on those days, I find a bit of blogging or FB-ing is the perfect warm-up to help get you going - like doing five finger exercises for piano players or pulling the choke out on an engine ...


Proof reading is SO tedious ...
A Tale of Two Wippitts:  Meet my office assistants, Archie and Angel. This blog was originally intended as a way of learning about how to do the blogging thing. The wippitts took it over from the very start and have remained firmly in control ever since.

Dog friendly gardening: The latest blog; a good way of adding extra snippets of information to that contained in the paper book of the same name.
Oh, and there's a FB page too for dog friendly gardening HERE






And don't forget Haunting Hounds - the FB page is HERE









Of course there's also the Authors Electric blog too - but as you've already found your way to this page no link needed - but perhaps you might like to add it to your favourites?






Comments

julia jones said…
I like your expression "pulling a muscle" in your brain! Agree that blogging and sales don't really have much to do with each other but I think I like the monthly obligation because it offers a chance of a different type of writing -- more like a newspaper column perhaps? I tend to leave it until almost the last moment and then ask myself what I'm actually interested in that week. It's very often whatever I've recently been working on or reading but it doesn't have to be and I enjoy that sense of freedom.
Bill Kirton said…
I agree about blogging, Karen. It's a chore but I find that, through my own blog and this one, I've actually made some real online friends and discovered writers whose books I might not have found otherwise. And I'm always learning things from other people's blogs. (But it's still a chore writing my own.)
Lydia Bennet said…
yes the monthly blog post is a useful discipline, and I do love reading all the others too, and learning from them.

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