Blogging to promote your book

So, my sys admin just got back from Community Leadership Summit West, a conference for online community managers. That’s what he does. He manages an online community. That’s actually what I do, too, except he gets paid.

This is important to writers because of the way the publishing industry is morphing from a long-time traditional model—you give us your books, and we’ll edit, publish, sell, and promote them for the lion’s share of the profit—to a new, largely-undefined model—you do whatever the heck you want, working your butt off and spending your own money to do our job for us, and we’ll go spectacularly down the tubes, as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s parent company, EMPG, is doing this very minute.

I’ve been talking to author Ania Vesenny about blogging as a writer’s promotional tool. Does it really work?

Well, that’s hard to say, since the one overriding quality of the Internet is its extraordinary capacity to facilitate LYING. I just read a fascinating piece by Dilbert creator Scott Adams last night on whether or not online reviews should be made illegal.

He uses as an example a book of his based on his blog posts, which some offended readers panned in revenge for him removing the posts and turning them into a book. That handful of people reviewed him over and over and over again to give him ratings of 1 so they could artificially drag his overall rating down and discourage potential buyers. Adams cites other instances in which fake reviewers are known to abuse the opportunity to review in order to market or reverse-market. He suggests that online reviewing is routinely abused now to the extent of making it meaningless.

In the comments on Adams’ article, reader after reader says, “Yeah, I worked for a company that always asked the employees to vote for its products in order to artificially inflate the ratings.”

What does this mean for the average blogging writer?

Well, for one thing the chances are you’ll never tangle with the issue personally. In order for someone to want to discourage fans, you have to have fans to be discouraged, and as Copyblogger recently observed, “No One is Reading Your Blog.”

So something online community managers are wrestling with, in this context, is numbers. For a long time it was all about numbers. How many thousands of hits does your site get? How many thousands are following you on Twitter? If you calculate commenters as 1% of your readership, how many comments does your site have to receive in order to imply the necessary thousands of readers it takes to attract advertisers or, on the other hand, book buyers and, by extension, a traditional publisher?

Take note of that word “imply.” I was, needless to say, shocked when my sys admin remarked recently in a conversation about site hits, “People lie.”

“What do you mean, lie? Aren’t there counters to prevent them from doing that?”

“Counters can be tweaked.”

“Are you kidding me? People lie about how many hits they get? Like, by the thousands?”

“Sure. You can’t stop them. You say, ‘How many readers do you have?’ and they say, “Ten thousand,’ and there is no way on earth to verify or not verify that.”

“Huh.” I was nonplussed. “So all those other sites out there—”

Man, am I naive.

And since the Internet makes it possible to lie about your hits, the only way to guess at a blogger’s real numbers is to look at their comments and extrapolate a formula. Which is still, actually, guessing. This is compounded by the fact that the Internet also makes it possible for you to lie about whether or not you are, in fact, your own commenters. There’s even a term—“sock puppet”—for faking your identity online. Lying about who you are.

And the motivation to lie is proportionally increased based upon what you can gain by lying. People, for all their presumed savvy in this Digital Age, are still quite easily manipulated by the herd, even when it’s imaginary.

It’s kind of touching, really.

So someone came up with the term “kwanzas” to describe sites without the gargantuan numbers, sites where a small handful of people read, comment, shoot the breeze together. . .form human connections. This is now all the rage: focus not on numbers, but on participation. Quality, not quantity.

Well, that’s nothing new. In fact, the dichotomy of quality over quantity has been an issue ever since the rise of advertising and its demon offspring marketing created the potential for false assumptions about quality based on quantity. We’re talking the entire twentieth century.

So what IS the purpose of a blog? And how well does it fulfill it?

For a writer promoting a book, the purpose is to bring in potential buyers. But given that the numbers you read about when you listen to social media ‘experts’ are simply not the numbers you, personally, experience, how does that affect what you hope to achieve with your blog?

Back up.

Because before you can determine what you want out of your blog, as a writer you must first determine what you want out of your book.

And marketers and social media ‘experts’ aside, what you want does not entirely determine what you get.

What is your purpose in being a writer? Are you writing because you love to write? Are you writing because you want to be read by other people (e.g. strangers)? Are you writing to get personal validation from agents and editors and publishers (“You’re better than those other losers who are always trying to get our attention”)? Are you writing to make money? Are you writing to make a mint?

All of these things do not add up to the same thing.

If your goal is to get personal validation from heavy-weights in the publishing industry, well, all I can say is good luck to you and about two hundred thousand others exactly like you. Blog to impress them that you’re willing to do your own promotion. They’ll look at your numbers.

If your goal is to be read by others, hey, throw it out on Lulu and see what happens. Blog to attract the interest of folks out there who are also interested in your subject matter and/or writing style and/or attitude. (Do not underestimate attitude. Blogs that succeed wildly do so to a large extent on their attitude.)

If your goal is to make money, you’re simply going to have to get a real job. But you would have had to do that, anyway.

My goal has been since I was about 18 years old to play with words and language and storytelling and description and dialog and characters, plus fonts and page layout and books and more words. I wanted to open a book and see my own stuff looking exactly the way I designed it to look. And that’s what I’m working on now.

It didn’t turn out right the first time around, with a traditional publisher.

But now I’m spending my days editing and polishing essays on my all-time favorite subject matter, the craft of fiction. I’m writing new pieces to cover aspects I forgot to cover before, playing with typefaces, putting my stuff into Page Preview, and paging through it admiringly. I’m sitting around scratching my head over things like action scenes (how do you analyze them? dissect them? write them?) and word choice (to adverb or not to adverb?) and Bookman italic and bold and what less-technical terms I can use for section and subsection, since I don’t want my book to read like a technical manual.

My book isn’t even published yet, and here I’ve already achieved my lifelong goal!

Oh, BOY.