Blogging & Author Platform

I’ve spent a significant part of the last twenty-four hours doing a spring-clean of petermball.com, going through a bunch of old posts and cleaning up broken links, adding tags that didn’t previously exist, and generally cleaning up some of the clutter in the category section to make it easier to find old content.

This proved to be a considerably weird task. I set out with no real plan when I launched the site in 2008, basing my approach to blogging on my experiences with livejournal and mimicking the style of blog posts used by authors whose platforms I particularly enjoyed. And this worked, for a time, but as with most long-term projects that writers start, it grew more complex and thought-out as I went along.

It’s also proved valuable to look at my old blogging habits with the benefit of hindsight, especially since I kicked things off with a very different mindset than I bring to the blog today. Since talking about author platform is one of our things at work (and I’m teaching Year of the Author Platform for QWC this year), I found myself taking notes as I went along.

IT ALL STARTED WITH CONNECTION

I found myself wincing an awful lot when I went through the first few years of posts. After going through the first six months, I felt the need to track down everyone who followed my blog in those days and apologise profusely for wasting their time.

While a lot of those early posts felt banal – and hell, lets be honest, they were banal in a lot of ways – they’re also an artifact of a different era in terms of the internet.

In 2008 Facebook was only just hitting maturity as a platform, three years into its rapid rise. Twitter was two years old at that point, but on the tail end of it’s first real growth spurt that plunged it into the public consciousness. Livejournal still seemed like a vibrant community hub, although the downward trend had started, and we still talked about MySpace as thought it had the potential to rise from the dead.

While there were undoubtedly writers out there who were ahead of the curve in terms of providing content, writers and readers alike were still in the tail end of the era where connection still seemed like an exciting thing.

AS PLATFORM TOOLS MATURE, YOUR APPROACH NEEDS TO EVOLVE

In 2008 were hundreds of authors – established and aspiring – who worked off the theory that building a platform meant showing up and letting people get a glimpse of your life: the day-to-day routine, the writing process, the successes and failures.

Move forward five or six years and the initial thrill of connection has largely played itself out. We’re no longer interested in seeing blog posts about the minutia of one-another’s lives – twitter and facebook handle that so much better – and the folks who have survived and thrived were the people providing quality content that engaged their readers.

Short version: we don’t really care what you did with your weekend anymore, unless you’re a writer we’ve already heavily invested in for other reasons.

KEEP YOUR CATEGORIES LEAN AND MEAN

My categories grew pretty organically when I started blogging, which would have been fine if I’d kept an eye on things and used the same ones over-and-over. Unfortunately, that isn’t the way things happened, and by the time I started the spring-clean there 3 categories packed with posts and over twenty categories on my blog that had 4 or fewer posts. Some of them existed as an in-joke, rather than a means of sorting and finding content on the blog.

Given how useful they are as a tool – and how important they are to a whole bunch of plug-ins – I really should have spent a little more time thinking these through when I started.

Now I’ve cut things back to eleven categories that serve as a better break-down of the kinds of things I’ve blogged about in the past, or plan to blog about in the future. The final wording for each category still needs to be fine-tuned, but they’re doing the job they’re meant to be doing.

“NOTHING” IS BETTER THAN “CLUTTER”

If you’re not inclined to keep your categories focused, I’d argue you’re better off not using them and focusing on tags instead. I can tell you from working my way through the nightmare that was this site, nothing is better than clutter.

Or, if you are going to create things on the fly, have a running list of what you’ve already created and using. It’ll keep you from having a list that includes, say, punk, punk music, punk rock, and punk videos, all doing the same thing.

STOP LIVING WITH WHAT USED TO WORK AND LEARN TO USE YOUR TOOLS

One of the reasons I didn’t put much thought into choosing WordPress as a CMS when I debuted. I picked it because it promised the possibility of cross-posting to livejournal, which seemed significantly more important in 2008.

Like many authors, I still had a fairly engaged community built up on LJ, and despite the logic behind starting a self-hosted site to “look more professional,” my focus (and comment threads) remained over there. I didn’t really embrace the strengths of WordPress and focused on making it act like Livejournal for a good year or two before I finally acknowledged that me and livejournal were done.

I could have saved myself an awful lot of time while spring-cleaning my content if I’d just learned how to use WordPress and its various features from the outset. If you’re going to use a new blogging system or social media tool, commit to it. Learn it’s strengths and figure out how to use its important features.

LATER COMES MUCH LATER THAN YOU THINK

I set out to do this update about two years back, when it first occurred to me that I should have a little more focus on the blog. “I’ll get to it sooner or later.”

So much of your platform is a day-to-day thing, focusing on the next post, the next tweet, the next instagram photo. You have to make time to actually plan things, otherwise it keeps getting pushed further and further into the background.

OLD CONTENT NEVER REALLY DIES

A lot of the day-to-day posts aren’t really interesting, but even going back to the early days of the site there were a handful of posts that were still relevant and useful. Pro-Bloggers and non-fiction writers have always known the value of having evergreen content that never goes out of date, but it never really seems to be on the radar of most fiction writers.

It’s worth paying attention to your archives, even if you’ve been a fairly day-by-day blogger. I’ve got a whole file full of stuff that I’d be happy to call attention to again, plus some posts where I did such a half-arsed job of explaining something that there’s probably some mileage to be had out of revisiting the topic.

GIVE CONTEXT TO OUTGOING LINKS

In the early days of this blog, I spent a little over a year posting youtube clips of my favourite songs every Friday. While I occasionally posted a lot of commentary with those links, there were just as many posts where I simply threw up the video and said enjoy, see you all Monday, peeps before disappearing.

There’s a time and a place for the occasional quick link or youtube clip, but it’s worth noting that internet isn’t the most permanent of places.  Youtube account get cancelled. Blogs get shut down. Someone re-organises their site and a whole bunch of incoming links end up broken.

These days I tend to do a lot more of my link-sharing over on twitter, where the fast pace means the lack of permanence isn’t as big an issue, but when you’re posting links from a blog, make sure you give the reader (and yourself) some context about what they’re going to find on the far side. This will allow them to figure out if trying to find the link is worthwhile, and also gives them some insight into what should be typed into Google in order to find the information you’re looking for.

THE SPOOKY THING ABOUT A BLOG

It occurred to me, very recently, that a writer’s blog is probably the most sustained, long-term engagement they’ll ever have with their audience. Fans will read a story in an hour or so, a novel in a couple of days, but fans of a blog can potentially stick around for years if the content and the narrative they’re being offered is to their liking.

This, if nothing else, is one of those things that drives me to blog better than I am.

PLACE THE MOST TRUST IN THE TOOLS YOU OWN

For all the mistakes I made kicking off this site, it still remains the smartest thing I’ve done in terms of developing an author platform. It provides a central hub from which everything else happens, a stable core to my online activities that can adept with the changing internet.

The best metaphor I’ve seen in this regard comes from Michael Hyatt’s book, Platform, where he points out that we’re essentially renting our space on services like twitter, facebook, and, yes, livejournal. We’re at the mercy of the people who run those services, and when they cease to be profitable, those services can go away.

Using a website you pay for as the core of your online presence makes sense, because it means that you’re the one who decides how long it stays online and what happens to the content you put there.

If you’re going to invest in learning to use any part of your platform well, start with your site and work out from there. Everything else you’re renting, but your site is the one thing you own.

So I’m going to be polishing off the rest of the Dancing Monkey topics over the next week or so, ’cause I have partially completed costs about most of them and ’cause people asked for interesting topics that I actually enjoy blogging. With that in mind, I’m hitting up the next topic on the list, which came from the inimitable Steve D.

What about a locum or an apprentice? On that topic, you could blog about what being a professional blogger is like, as a job, and where it leads, and who should consider it.

Let’s set aside the first part of the question, since I’m assuming it was largely a suggestion based on the impetus of the Dancing Monkey posts – wanting to keep the blog active while I was travelling. In hindsight I can look at this and say, well, yes, that would have been a smart idea, but on the whole I rather like the idea of my blog staying my blog, and the idea of taking on an apprentice/guest poster just seems weird.

At the dayjob, I have no such compunctions. Part of my dayjob is providing content for the Australian Writer’s Marketplace Speakeasy blog (in addition to facebook and twitter content), and it’s one of those hungry beasts that can never be satiated. When it was suggested I take on an editorial intern, I nodded and figured out what could be handed over and celebrated like it was Christmas. My current intern is a godsend, is far too good to be interning, and really should be snapped up and given a job by someone sensible before too long.

Despite all this, I’m not really a professional blogger. Pro-Blogger, like Indie Publisher, is one of those words that has a very specific kind of interpretation when you spend too much time around the internet, and it’s not a title that really fits what I do for the QWC. When I started in my current role, we kinda bandied around titles until we came up with Digital Content and Community Manager.

Mostly this means I get to spend a lot of time thinking about blogging, rather than blogging, as the actual writing of blogs is a small-but-important part of my job rather than the focus of it. It is, no doubt, a kick-ass part of my job – if nothing else, curating a list of interesting publishing, editing, and writing advice is a natural progression of the reasons I go on the internet. Getting to follow momentary obsessions (such as crowdsourcing) to do posts about them is similarly cool, as is being able to email editors and ask them a bunch of questions about their publications. The Speakeasy mandate largely coincides with things I’m naturally interested in, so it’s a pretty sweet gig.

The fact that I don’t have to be generating content continuously does separate me from most pro-bloggers though. Speakeasy has a bare-bones kind of routine – at least once a week, there will be a round-up post that rounds up news, links, and writing advice from around the internet – and it has other regular features that are being added on as time, contacts, and experience allow. Being primarily curatorial in approach, the blogging part of my job largely involves assimilating the RSS feed of doom every week, finding some interesting stuff, and putting some context around it.  On particularly busy weeks, the context is a bit…well, sparse…but it’s always there.

Long term, it’s probably going to get more involved than it current is, but there’s a series of steps and conversations that need to happen before that happens.

Also, ’cause blogging is a small-but-important part of my job, I get a paycheque whether there’s new blog content up or not. This is huge in blogging terms, since it means that I’m not really living and dying by blog metrics and user interaction. Nor do we need to figure out ways to leverage blog readers and transform them into profit. All things going well, it should eventually become important enough to justify doing both those things, but for the moment Speakeasy can be a relatively low-key thing with one or two regular features and my boss is relatively happy, because it means I can maintain the pace of new content and balance it against the parts of my job that are all about organising conventions and providing feedback for aspiring writers and teaching the occasional class (fortunately, none ’til 2013 at this point).

I predict, should you ask me this question again next year, I’ll have a very different answer. A lot of what’s happening with Speakeasy now is really set-up for stuff we’d like to do down the road, and the period between October and December this year is where I really figure out what’s feasible and what’s not ( its also when I figure out if my QWC contract will get renewed, and whether Speakeasy will still be part of it).

If there’s anyone seriously interested in blogging, I usually do three things.

First, I direct them towards Chris Guillebeau’s free ebook 279 Days to Overnight Success.It introduces the principles of blogging pretty well, has some of the best starting advice I’ve ever (aka generally three months worth of content to have in reserve; man, if only I’d learnt that lesson earlier), and generally breaks things down util they seen achievable.  As introductory texts go is’s kinda awesome, and it’s hard to go past free as a price.

Secondly, I send them to go check out sights like Brain Pickings (an example of a curatorial blog done brilliantly well), Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (an example of a community-driven blog done right – one of my dreams is to recruit a half-dozen SF/nerdcore types and do something similar for Genre Fiction and RPGS), and Chuck Wendig’s site (which is, at present, my default example of “writer-type leveraging the internet in the smartest fucking way possible” when I give workshops on this kind of thing).

Thirdly, I suggest spending a month or three following a site like pro-blogger, which is chock-full of advice for…well, pro-bloggers. Too long there will do something weird for your brain, since pro-bloggers largely look at the internet that I find enormously complicated and difficult to maintain an interest in, but a few months of seeing the kind content that appears regularly on the feed will introduce you to all sorts of basics about structuring post content, planning ahead, and other day-to-day minutia of running a successful blog. It’s the kind of stuff I like to think of as “absorb and ignore” – you learn it, you make it part of your process, then you set it aside and just do your thing without really thinking about it unless it’s absolutely necessary.

Sort of like three-act story structure, really.