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A recent blog post at Writer Unboxed talks about how audience development is an important step for authors - even writers who aren't yet published.
The author (Jane Friedman of Writer's Digest) says writers (and aspiring writers) should:
* Interact with friends and other writers on a social network
* Develop relationships with writers and potential readers on Twitter
* Participate in forums that tie into your work’s genre, topic, or subject matter
* Comment on blogs
* Have a website or blog
Obviously, since I have accounts on Facebook/Twitter/LiveJournal/ plus a bunch of other sites that I don't use, and even have a website (which I've just started redesigning to help pull together my social sites and improve my search results), I see value in connecting with people online. But as an aspiring writer who has yet to sell a single short story, my goals are to learn from and help other writers and to keep in touch with friends and family. I might even be networking. I'm not trying to build an audience.
And speaking as a reader and as someone who reads a lot of authors' blogs, I can think of exactly one person whose blog led me to her novel - and that path started with her fanfiction. If I hadn't had that sample at my fingertips to get and keep my attention over the year or two before her book came out, would I have added the book to my to-read list? Probably not. (There are a dozen or so authors whose works I've read after I got to "know" them online, but those were based on my "if I'm reading this person's thoughts or advice about writing, I should see what I think of their actual writing" philosophy.)
But other readers are not me, and I have seen this advice in enough places that I think it must have some value.
So, fellow aspiring writers:
* Have you ever bought a book because of the author's (unrelated) blog posts?
* Are you deliberately trying to develop an audience? Why?
* Do you consciously choose topics and writing styles with that future audience in mind?
* What do you write about, in the Venn diagram of (topics that interest author) (topics that interest potential readers) (topics that relate to the book)?
* Given that there's only so much writing time in a day, why spend it building an audience rather than writing?
(And now I'm going to post links to this on my blog and Twitter, and email the link to my writer's group. But I'm having a conversation, not building an audience.)
February 21 2010, 22:39:33 UTC 2 years ago
2. No. I think there's something to, say, branding and blogging to one's strengths, instead of just spouting off about any damn thing. (Scalzi, for instance, for all his "Whatever" has a pretty serious core of topics, despite his insistence that the blog is totally about whatever. That's the sort of rhetorical escape hatch he uses when he does want to stray from his core.)
3. Not exactly. Again, when I do post, I post about the things I genuinely have something to say about and can offer some kind of perspective. Whether this will mesh well with a future audience of my books, I can't tell, mostly because my genre/subgenre mix in working projects is rather varied.
4. A mix of one and two, since I'm just not sure what from the umbrella of three is going to be relevant. I mean, right now I'm working on a fantasy that, among other world-building devices, features a generally non-Western diet. But I'm not going to pour my energy into posting rice bread recipes in case a) that aspect of the work gets minimalized in edits or b) that book never sees the light of day at all. I'll post about what interests me, and what might interest others, with an eye toward the vague and general branding of me the writer and blogger, rather than my story specifically.
I'm not particularly interested in getting pigeonholed, by way of blog-book tie-ins, into writing about particular things forever. And I think that's an easy trap to get into if I focus too much on trying to preposition an audience with the blog.
February 22 2010, 13:58:35 UTC 2 years ago
Re: 3 - Makes sense.
Re: 4 - I guess my issue with what I should blog about is, for which book? There's not much overlap between a YA Native American based fantasy to a contemporary adult fantasy with a made-up mythology.
February 22 2010, 11:33:18 UTC 2 years ago
Otherwise I have no intention at all of deliberately building a relationship with potential readers with my blogging, such as it is. I regard the people I interact with online as my friends and acquaintances. I would no more expect them to buy a novel of mine than I would expect the people I know face-to-face to. They're friends because I have things in common with them, I'm not wooing them because I think in the future they may earn me money.
As I'm not yet a published novelist, the question is hypothetical, but assuming I was, am I never to be allowed a social life or time off from being a professional writer?
February 22 2010, 14:01:42 UTC 2 years ago
And now that you mention it, I've done the "I've been reading about...let's see how it turned out" thing.
February 22 2010, 18:39:34 UTC 2 years ago Edited: February 22 2010, 18:39:50 UTC
#2 & #3 Yes and Yes. My blog is very much a writer's blog, but I don't believe (and it's not my intention that) it will make people want to buy my novel when it comes out.
The most I can hope for by developing an online presence is that people will recognize my name when they see it on the spine of a book or an advertisement, and that some of those folks will then decide to read the blurb (something which they would not otherwise have done). After that, it's down to the individual reader and his/her personal taste.
#4 most of my posts are aimed at writers. Less than one in ten is about my own work.
#5 With about 300,000 books published in the US every year, writers need all the help they can get.
Hope that helps :)
February 23 2010, 04:59:45 UTC 2 years ago
February 23 2010, 17:23:02 UTC 2 years ago
I run a writing blog on
This does not mean I don't talk about writing on my blog because I *like* talking about writing and many of my friends are writers, so I like talking *to* them about books.
As a random reader, I hate it when an author seems to see me as a source of revenue rather than a person. If someone doesn't interact with me, I might still read their articles, but I am not emotionally invested, and I am less likely to buy their book.
There are a couple of people on my flist who write so interesting - they have a way with words and an interesting way of looking at the world - that I would buy a book by them whatever it is; and a number of people I like and who talk interesting about books are people whose books I want to read.
On the other hand, I've experienced a disparity between 'like what this person says' and 'like their books' (both on blogs and at cons) that I no longer expect the two to automatically match.
February 24 2010, 01:33:50 UTC 2 years ago
Re: Your last paragraph - Yes, me too. Some people write about writing in ways I find interesting, but don't write fiction that I like.