Tag Archives: Blogging

How I Blog

Want to start your own blog? Try blogging like I do.

In the past 11 years, I’ve written over 650 blogposts. When I started, experts advised fiction writers to blog as a way to increase their online footprint and drive book sales.

These days I’m not sure that matters much. YouTube might be a better venue, if you can create standout videos. But hours spent blogging (or shooting videos) are hours not spent writing fiction. Still, it’s become a weekly routine for me.

Before I began in 2011, I listed about 20 ideas for topics and created a Blog File. Whenever I saw an article or had some stray thought worth blogging about, I added it to my list. Today, the list runs to 168 topics.

I start a new Blog File every year, copying the unused topics left over from the previous year. The file lists published blogposts, future topics, and contains the posts themselves.

Each week, on Thursday, I select a topic from the list, unless a more urgent topic idea occurs to me. After choosing the topic, I jot notes for points I’d like to make in the post, and might even organize these notes and do some online research.

On Friday, I use the notes to write the post’s first draft. I create the draft in my word processor program, not on the blog platform (WordPress). Since each post should have an image, I work on that, too.

Be careful using images from the net. They might be copyrighted. You can’t get in trouble taking your own photos. My wife kindly consents to taking pictures of me. Someday she’ll hand me a bill for all that work, and I don’t know where I’ll find the money.

Saturday arrives—editing day. Still working offline in my word processor, I improve prose clarity, check spelling and grammar, and adjust the image. My word-count goal’s between 500 and 600, though those aren’t firm limits.

When the text meets my satisfaction, I copy it to WordPress as a draft post. Next, I import and position the image and set up all the hyperlinks. A preview of the post helps me make sure it looks right and that the links work as they should.

Early Sunday morning—showtime. I review the post one last time. If I change something, I make the change on WordPress and in my Blog File, which serves as my backup.

After designating appropriate categories and tags, I preview the post one last time, and then publish it. I then draw attention to it using Twitter and Facebook. In the Blog File, I move that topic from the ‘unused’ to ‘used’ list. Done.

If that process sounds rigid, maybe it’s because I’ve made it sound stricter than it is. I’ve posted on days other than Sunday, and skipped weeks on occasion.

Overall, I believe I’ve benefited from the discipline of weekly posts. The schedule pressure stimulates my writing creativity and productivity. I enjoy it.

Has blogging boosted story sales? Hard to say. Sometimes my blog posts reach the first page of search engine lists for certain topics, so that may result in more visits to my blog, more views of my stories, and maybe a purchase or two.

Would blogging work for you? Only one way to find out. Start doing it. Pretty soon you’ll be blogging like—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 7, 2022Permalink

Has It Been 10 Years Already?

I started this Poseidon’s Scribe blog in January 2011, so it seems I’ve been doing this for a decade now. I’m closing in on 600 blog posts (this is my 587th). Hard to believe Poseidon’s Scribe is ten years old.

It was very kind of author Todd Sullivan to interview me on the subject of blogging discipline. You can watch the interview on YouTube.

In fact, I’ve included a new Interviews tab on my website, so you can read or view all the interviews of your favorite blogger and author.

Back to Todd Sullivan’s interview of me. In that video, I provided the following overall advice about blogs:

  • Valuable content. Provide useful information to readers.
  • Quality writing. Keep posts brief, interesting, and well written.
  • Clean appearance. Make your site uncluttered and easy to navigate.
  • Periodic posts. Establish a rhythm of posting and stick to it.

Here’s what I advised about starting a blog:

  • Write down why you want to blog. What’s your niche?
  • Identify your intended audience. Whom are you writing to?
  • What might your audience want to know, that you can provide?
  • Write down 20 topics for your first 20 blogposts
  • Add to that list as you come across other ideas
  • Commit to posting on a regular schedule (helps you, readers, and site popularity)
  • Don’t expect instant followers, comments, or notice, let alone fame.

This was what I said about writing individual blogposts:

  • Craft an interesting and useful subject line. Numbers catch readers’ eyes, as do the words you, your, and you’re.
  • Include an image or video with your posts
  • Start with a rough outline before writing, but be willing to deviate from it.
  • Edit by imagining you’re a reader just surfing to that post. Cut boring stuff. No long paragraphs. Keep the overall post short.
  • Proofread before publishing

To supplement the advice I gave in the interview, I’d add this—it’s best not to dedicate your blog to the craft of writing. The net is saturated with writers writing about writing. Consider blogging about the subjects you write about instead. If your fiction focuses on certain settings, or characters, or themes, write about them.

I’ll go further than that. Consider not blogging at all. Set up a website, sure. It can be a fairly static one, with your bio, your bibliography, your scheduled appearances, etc. But think about this before you start blogging: time spent blogging is time you could be spending on your fiction.

Back in 2011, experts advised all beginning writers to blog. It was, and remains, a good way to increase your online footprint and to raise your site ranking in searches for the topics you blog about.

However, I’m not sure it increases sales of your fiction, or improves the quality of your stories. Think about that before you start a blog.

If your goal is better fiction, or more sales, work on your fiction and your marketing.

For me, though, a decade-old habit is hard to break. You can look forward to more years of steady blogging from—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 14, 2021Permalink

12 Cures for Stir-Craziness

Stay in your homes, the experts tell us. Keep away from others. Don’t gather in bars, restaurants, or theaters. There aren’t any sports. All your club meetings are cancelled. The boss called off that business trip and made you telework. You’re bored, being at home all the time. You’ve gone stir-crazy. What to do?

Here’s my answer—write something.

That’s right. Sit at your keyboard, or grab pen and paper, and write something.

“But,” you’re saying, “I’m not a writer!”

My answer—how do you know?

Here’s my list of stir-craziness cures, staring with the easiest ideas:

  1. Why not make a list of supplies you’re going to need soon? Wow! You’re writing!
  2. Remember that personal organizer book you bought back in 2015, and never used? Dig it out. You could come up with some life goals, and plans to achieve them. Maybe even a personal mission statement. Or a bucket list. You never found time for that before, but you’ve got time now.
  3. Start a journal (or diary, or logbook—call it what you want). Write down whatever occurs to you. Write about social distancing, and how much you hate it. Write about feeling like you’re under house arrest, the isolation and loneliness. Get the emotions out. Write as if nobody will ever read it.
  4. Write emails to relatives and friends you haven’t connected to in a while. Write tweets and Facebook posts. Write old-fashioned letters, on stationery; the Post Office still delivers.
  5. Write an article, essay, or vignette. The topic should be something you know about. At first, write as if you’re not going to send it anywhere. Later, as you look back over it and fix it up, it might not seem half bad. Perhaps it’s publishable.
  6. Start a blog. You can do it. It probably won’t change the world, but it might help you, and that’s a beginning.
  7. If you’re up for fiction, start with something short. There’s the six-word story, the 280-character story (twitterature), the dribble (50 words), the drabble (100 words), sudden fiction (750 words), or flash fiction (1000 words). Editors are looking for good stories of these lengths, and readers like them too.
  8. How about poetry? Can you make words sing, or fly, or lift a heart?
  9. Create a short story, with a few characters, or even just one. Focus on a single effect or mood. Editors and readers love well-written short stories. In fact, I know two editors searching for 3000-5000-word short stories inspired by Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Read the rules here, write your story, and send it in!
  10. Write a non-fiction book. You’re an expert in something. Perhaps you can expand that essay you wrote (see #5 above) to book length. Cookbooks, history books, coffee-table books, memoirs—they get bought all the time. Ooh, how about a travel book? Few people are traveling now, but everyone longs to.
  11. Write a children’s book, or YA (young adult). You’ll need a good imagination and the experience of having been young.
  12. Write the Great American Novel. As they say, writing a novel is a one-day event (as in ‘One day, I’ll write a novel’). You’ve got time now; excuses are gone. No need to wait for November; you can have a personal Nanowrimo now.

You may be cooped up, but your imagination isn’t, your words aren’t. Set them free! There’s no charge for this prescription for stir-craziness written by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 22, 2020Permalink

Building Your Author Website

You’ve heard authors need websites, but you don’t know how to create one. Read on, and learn.

First, it’s not true that you need a website. You do need an online presence that shows you to be an author. That can consist of accounts on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc. However, I’d guess most authors have their own website.

Building author websiteA website does at least the following things for you:

  • Tells readers who you are and what you’ve written
  • Tells readers where they can get your books
  • Tells potential publishers and editors that you’re a serious professional
  • Provides interesting, even exciting, content linking what you’re selling to what readers want

I’ll presume you know, or can easily find out, the mechanics of setting up a generic website. There are a variety of hosting services out there and they have video tutorials and instructional blog posts on how to do that. I’m focusing on making an author website, as distinguished from other types of sites.

First, think about grabbing interest. Think like a newspaper cartoonist. One such cartoonist wrote that people view a political cartoon for about three to five seconds. That’s it. Readers buy the newspaper for the articles, so they’re prepared to read a few of them, if the headlines attract. But the cartoonist must seize attention in just a few seconds.

The same goes for your website. Your potential readers are surfing the web for free, so they only linger on a site if it grabs them right away. You only get a moment to show them enough about you for them to stay awhile and explore your site.

That means you don’t want long blocks of text. Also, break up your text with appealing, welcoming images. The images and text you choose on your home page may be giving the first impression visitors have of you. At a glance, they should get a good idea of the type of books you write, and some notion of the type of person you are.

Set up your site to appeal to your potential readers. Use words and images selected to attract them. Your site then becomes a suddenly impactful ‘story’ of you and your books.

Unless you have a good reason not to, you should include a picture of yourself. Although it shouldn’t matter, readers like to see what their authors look like. (Yes, I know, I don’t have my own pic on my website, except for a couple of blog entries here and here.)

Assuming the visitors to your site now have their curiosity piqued, your website should also tell them where they can buy your books and where you may be appearing so they can meet you.

A blog can draw visitors to your site, especially once you have a number of blog posts under your belt. Internet searches for your blog post topics can guide surfers to your site.

If you decide to blog, know this—it will eat into your fiction writing time. Before you start blogging, I recommend you write down twenty topics or so. Not the whole post, just the topic. Commit to posting on a regular periodicity and stick to it. It can be daily, weekly, every other week, etc., but you should adhere to the schedule. As new ideas for future blog post topics occur to you, add them to the bottom of your topic list.

For other ideas about building your author website, check out the websites of your favorite authors, and others. Also look at other blog posts on the topic, such as this one, by Thomas Umstattd.

Once you launch your website, be sure to tell the world that you learned how to do it from—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 7, 2016Permalink

But I Didn’t Order Spam

When I started this blog three years ago, I imagined people would view it, and comments would start pouring in.  I’m pleased to report the comments are pouring in, at a total of more than 37,000 so far.  The bad news is, all but 73 are spam.  Of the 73, only 42 are comments from other people, the remainder being my responses.

SpamWhat is this spam that constitutes 99.8% of the comments I receive?  It’s a comment not intended to respond to my blog post at all, but rather to create a link back to the spammer’s website that increases the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranking of that website.

At first I puzzled over these.  I’d get comments from someone named Daewrnad Ylkernkc, or Prostate Cancer, or Ugg Boots—vague comments like “Great blog post. I enjoyed it.” or “I was surfing the web, found your site, and the information here is great.  Keep it up!”  Often the comments contained spelling and grammatical errors.  Some went on and on about topics unrelated to my post. Some comments were in foreign languages, and some consisted of nothing but question marks.

I considered replying “Thanks, Ms. Ylkernkc, (or Mr. Cancer, etc.), I’m glad you enjoyed my blog post.  Visit any time.”  But a friend explained the concept of spam to me.

Now I use a WordPress plugin called Akismet to screen all the comments I receive and it sorts out which ones it thinks are spam and which are legitimate.  That Akismet software is pretty good, I must say.

Still, I do review every comment I get, whether Akismet considers it spam or not.  Often the spam is entertaining.  Sometimes I see a comment that comes quite close to a legitimate response to my specific blog post, but then I see that it’s from Ugg Boots and that there are seven more comments just like it from people with equally unlikely names.

I should state at this point that I do not mean to disparage the food product known as Spam® in any way.  My blog post refers solely to a different meaning of that word.  I’m sure Hormel Foods has considered renaming it, considering the negative connotations.

Akismet is not the only defense against spam. One day I might have to shift to Captcha, which makes would-be commenters have to pass a test to see if they’re human before they’re allowed to comment.

If you blog, are you inundated with spam, too?  How do you deal with it?  Leave a comment and let me know.  If you’re a spammer, feel free to leave a comment, but I’ll warn you right now that it won’t get approved by—

                                               Poseidon’s Scribe

February 23, 2014Permalink

Does Blogging Help Your Writing?

If you’re thinking of starting up a blog as a way to improve the quality of your fiction writing, I’m here to tell you—blogging will have just as much effect on your golf swing.

Hamlet blogMy answer is different if you write non-fiction.  Well-written blogs are like essays, with the same structure and purpose.  The skills needed are the same.

For fiction writers, there’s very little in common between your stories and your blog posts.  The talents you develop doing one won’t translate well to the other.

It’s even possible for blogging to worsen your fiction writing.  Certainly it’s cutting into your productivity, at least.  Each precious minute spent blogging is sixty seconds lost and unavailable for writing fiction.

Also, let’s say you become an expert in all the aspects of blogging, able to craft persuasive, short essays with well-researched facts, finely structured arguments, and logical conclusions.  It’s possible for that ‘lecturing voice’ to worm its way into your fiction, and you don’t want that.

Am I telling you, the beginning fiction writer, not to blog?  No, I’m just helping you set expectations; blogging won’t make your fiction better.  But there are several valid reasons for fiction authors to blog:

  • It helps enforce schedule discipline, and to associate deadlines with writing.  This is only true if you post to your blog on a regular basis.  Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, getting to ‘The End’ is important.
  • It’s a form of self-education.  When I come across an idea for a future blog entry, I add it to my list, (which is quite long now).  When I look to see what topic is scheduled for any particular week, I find it generally involves a bit of research.  So while blogging about the craft of writing, I’m coming across knowledge I can use.
  • The best reason for a fiction writer like you to blog, though, is to build your platform, increase your web presence, and connect with readers.

Blog if you want to, but don’t go into it thinking it’ll make your fiction better.  For those of you who disagree, that’s what the comment feature is for.  Please comment and let your views be known to the world and to—

                                                          Poseidon’s Scribe 

June 2, 2013Permalink