Let’s Talk About Blogging for Fiction Writers (No Really, Let’s Talk)
Please, please don’t write about your process. There’s a better way!
Photo by Brent Gorwin on Unsplash
I’m hosting a free 90-minute live video chat Thursday 9/12/19 at 8 p.m. EST all about blogging for fiction writers (and other creatives.) Click here to register. If you can’t make it live, don’t worry. I’ll send out the replay on Friday!
September’s Ninja Writer’s theme is Blogging for Creatives. We’re going to take a deep look over the next few weeks at what creatives…especially fiction writers…should really be doing when it comes to creating an online presence.
There’s so much bad information out there, when there’s any information at all. Most of the time we’re left trying to scramble to figure out how to make information fit our needs, when it wasn’t really meant for us.
Because lots of people are telling non-fiction writers how to blog and how to build an email list and how to reach their audience. But what about novelists or short story writers or poets or artists of any kind?
I got so excited the other day because on the big online writing advice guys was advertising a webinar promising that he had the answer. He was going to teach fiction writers how to blog. So I signed up and I logged in. And his big idea? Fiction writers should be writing book reviews he said. Write a book review every month.
I wanted to reach through my computer screen and strangle him. Or at least send some kind of message to all the other writers listening with bated breath.
Because that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
He’s helped fiction writers do some pretty amazing things, it’s true. But not this. What he’s done is take success fiction writers who already have a platform and helped them to expand on it. Which is a whole other animal from being a brand new, aspiring creative writer with no platform at all.
Here’s what we should not be blogging about: our own writing. No one cares about our cover reveals or our writing processes. They don’t even know us. They wouldn’t care about our writing process if we were their favorite writers.
I can prove it to you. Ask yourself how many writers you follow because you’re riveted by their processes?
Uh huh. Exactly. You follow them because they entertain you or they teach you something. You aren’t doing them a favor. It’s all about you.
And please, please, do not write book reviews. This is a bad idea on so many levels. Repeat after me: Book reviews are for readers. They aren’t our business. If you’re reviewing books similar to yours, you won’t be able to really be critical, so they’ll be weird, stilted reviews at the very least. I promise you, this is a bad idea.
Readers are human beings and human beings are all about themselves. That’s the truth. If you do two things, you’ll be able to build an audience that will love you and follow you and buy your books: introduce them to you and then make it all about them.
It doesn’t matter what you blog about. Whatever interests you, whatever is interesting about you, whatever you’re good at, whatever you want to be good at. You’ll find people who care about those things, too. And when you write for those readers, they’ll care about you and it becomes a whole circle of life thing. It’s beautiful.
We’re going to talk about that this month.
Starting on Thursday (9/12/19) with a free live chat. I’ll talk to you about my no-fail four-step method for never running out of blog topics and answer all your questions for 90 minutes starting at 8 p.m. EST. Click here to register for that call. If you can’t make it live, don’t worry. I’ll send out the replay on Friday!
Here’s my secret weapon for sticking with whatever your thing is.
Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes andis the author of Viral Nation and Rebel Nationand the upcoming novel The Astonishing Maybe. She is the original Ninja Writer.