blog? essential?

[grumpypants]

soooo, i keep reading about how novelists are found through different formats, and psyching myself up to do things like twitter, blogging, etc.
If you blog, do you write about your book? your writing? your children? everything?
can you fake blog? ie write a blog by fictional character? or is that not the done thing?
kind of feeling like getting going again, but fall into the unpublished/ not a journalist/ editor/ contactless category of writers.

bump

day off today - i'm going to try again for an answer! and maybe some suggestions for how on earth twitter works!

I stick with the motto, 'The book comes first'. There's not a publisher on earth who would read a fantastic ms that he/she couldn't put down and then decide to pass on it because the author didn't have a blog/Twitter/Facebook Page. You'd have to have some kind of spectacular platform to sell a just okay novel to a publisher and getting and maintaining that kind of platform as a beginner wouldn't leave you any time to write novels. My advice is to put your writing efforts into your actual ms to begin with. It's good to look willing to do these things and to be marketing savvy, but first and foremost you need something to market. Which is the actual ms.

thankyou! just not sure if there is this whole world of contacts out there that i am not joining in with. on the other hand, i'm not sure that writing a blog about writing a book would be much cop!

I'm going to agree with novelist.

The way to sell a book is to write a good one. Yes there have been a handful of bloggers who were getting so many hits that they were asked to turn it into a book, but they are tiny in number compared to the number of bloggers out there.

Blogs can be useful to get people started. Writing is a habit and a regularly updated bog can get you inot the habit of writing regularly.
That said, the two skills of writing a blog and writing a novel are not comparable.

Blogs can also be useful once you've had a book published for PR purpses.

Finally, blogs can make a decent business. If you get enough traffic you can sell advertising space and product placement. I have had several and they have all produced an income stream (though this has had its halcyon day imho).

As for contacts... don't worry. The vast vast majority of debut novelists have none whatsoever. Me included.

thank you; both of you have given really sensible advice. i may look at twitter but back to the familiar method! congrats wordfactory on the writing.

I think Twitter can be useful if you use it in the right way. I have a Twitter account that I just use for following people, not tweeting. I follow writers I like, bookshops, literary organisations, book festivals and so on. It's good for keeping up with publishing news, getting book recommendations, hearing about events and lots of other things. Plus, you often see links to competitions and giveaways on there. Not that I've ever won anything, but maybe one day.
Of course, all this means that I often spend a lot more time reading Twitter than I do actually writing. Some would call it procrastination, I like to think of it as research...!
I've just realised that this doesn't answer your question at all, as you obviously can't market yourself by lurking on Twitter! But it is definitely worth a look as I think it's much easier to tweet than to blog if you want to get your name out there and make contacts and connections. This site has some info on how writers can use Twitter.

Thank you - how kind. I was thinking maybe just following would be an idea - quiet lurking iyswim!

Blogs are useful if they're something you would do in addition to your normal writing time - but not if they eat into it. I have set one up but don't really get traffic yet as I haven't had time to set up reciprocal links without people/blog very often.

I have a twitter account, but although I do follow agents and writers, I largely talk on it about personal and work matters, so it's not something that's actively involved with my writing. You can learn a lot just by following, as already said.

If you want to write a book, write a book. Don't write a blog about how you want to write a book. Don't read blogs by other people who want to write a book. Just write the bloody book!

And switch your internet off, too, if you're too distracted.

Hi Imperial - it wasn't really the blogging about writing thing, more the new way of connecting that seemed to come up - Twitter, blogging etc.

I try and blog daily during the week to make sure I at least write something during the day. It generally gets me into the mood to keep going.

I don't blog about writing, just general rants.

I guess when I start to get published (if that ever happens) I will set up a simple blog link to send out with pitches.