Why the blog?

I was told that if I want to be a big grown-up author, I should have a blog, whether I want one or not. So, I set up a blog. Then I was told that I shouldn’t waste my time on a blog.

That’s the thing about setting out your stall as an author. As we stumble our way out of the first quarter of the Twenty-First Century, there is so much advice available that you don’t know who you should listen to, and who you should ignore. If I took all the advice that has been thrown at me, I would spend about a hundred hours a week on social media, blogging, writing this and that to raise my profile and build a platform (more about that in a moment), and I would have no time to eat or sleep. As for writing books, forget it.

There is such an overload of advice, totally free advice, available at the click of a mouse these days, that you disappear down more rabbit holes than Bugs Bunny, and of course, you encounter conflicting advice, and I mean diametrically opposed views, such as having, or not having, a blog.

So that is why what you are reading, is definitely not a blog, unless you want it to be, in which case it is. I think of it more as a newsletter, a blogletter perhaps. It can be anything you want it to be. Whatever makes you happy.

As a completely new and unknown author, starting from scratch, you have to build what is called a platform. If you don’t do that, then you may as well disappear down a deep hole and speak in tongues to the bedrock. Nobody is ever going to find out about you. You need to at least say hello to people, my name is Nigel, and I have written these books.

So far, so good. That makes complete sense.

As a completely new and unknown author, starting from scratch, you of course have no idea how to go about that, so you seek advice, and that is where it all gets messy. I found myself reading, or listening to, so much advice, that I didn’t have time to put any of it into practise.

If you are a big fancy pants author with an established reader base of a gazillion people, you don’t have this problem. You have a swanky website, staff to update it and look after it for you, agents to tell those staff what to do, a whole marketing team available at your publishers to make you look brilliant and cool. All you have to do is the occasional tweet, which of course will be checked by your team of people before it goes anywhere near the public. Your office looks a bit like Downton Abbey, with you in the drawing room, fountain pen in hand, and a whole team of servants silently making the whole place function.

I don’t even have a shed.

Not true, but I had to put that in for dramatic effect. I do have a nice little office, a spare room with a desk in it, a chair, something to pump out music, and notes scattered everywhere, and I mean, everywhere.

But in this office, there is just me. Little old me, with nobody to help me except those nice people on the other end of the internet, who keep giving me all this advice about building a platform, so that people like you, know that I exist.

So, what is the best thing to do with all this advice? Well, learn from it of course. Listen, take it all in, then go off and see what other authors do. Not the big boys and girls with vast publishing empires behind them, people like me. The people who write a lot of the books that people like you read these days. I spent hours, lots of hours, days, reading through websites, social media, Amazon pages, and what did I learn?

Well, everything and nothing I suppose, but having read all this advice, and soaked up all this information, I can now decide what works for me, and that is why I don’t have a blog, because this is definitely not a blog.

What I found is that some authors have blogs, and some don’t, and of those that do, a lot of them don’t update their blogs. They starve them to death and leave them to die. They start off with all sorts of good intentions, with things to say, and they say those things maybe once a week, once every two weeks, until they run out of ideas. It starts to take up too much of their time, time that they need to spend on writing their books, and saying hello, so that people like you know they are there. I found one, from a well-known author who I will not name and shame, not because I am being kind, but because I have forgotten who it is, that had not been updated for seven years.

When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. You get a dog. To start with you like the dog, it wags its tail when it is happy, and then you realise that there is something wrong with the dog. The tail is wagging the dog. You are updating the blog, (not the dog, the blog), not because you have something to say, but because it is there, and you haven’t updated it for two weeks. The dog, or the blog, needs feeding. So, you make something up, even if you have nothing to say.

I did exactly the same thing myself. I wrote a few finished blog posts, so that when I unveiled my website, there would be a few to read, and they were awful. They were written because I needed to write something. I wrote them because I needed to write content, not because I wanted to write anything worth writing about. Thankfully, I questioned this whole process, and saw them for what they were, and I put them in the bin.

So why am I writing this? Is this not just writing content? Well, no it isn’t. This is something that I thought people might find thought provoking, something that might apply to your life as well as mine. Sometimes, we need to stop walking down the path, and ask if we are walking down the right path. It is so easy to just keep walking without questioning where we are going. This applies to everything in our lives: Money, relationships, jobs, should we really be drinking so much coffee? If you keep going to the end of this, and trust me, we are nearly there, for some of you this will be your most useful thought for the day. Maybe today, or maybe tomorrow, or whenever, you will be doing something, and will stop and ask why? Is this the path I should be taking? If the answer is yes, then that’s great, carry on walking, but at least you have thought about it instead of plodding blindly on, because we are all guilty of doing that.

I have a brilliant man to thank for this moment of inspiration; David Gaughran, a really lovely man from the land of the bogs and the little people, who has helped me wade through this daunting process. He is the one who said, and pay attention now because this is important, that a blog is a waste of your time, and it takes up a huge amount of your time, so do not do it, and here’s the important bit, unless you feel it works for you.

We writers are all different, but in one respect we are all the same. We are all creative. Even the non-fiction writers, who perhaps write about using spanners, are creative. If they were not creative, they would be using spanners, instead of writing about using spanners. Creative people all have their own ways of doing things. Some people write very mechanically, with an intense focus on what they are writing, and their first attempt emerges onto the screen or onto the paper, almost perfect, almost finished. Lucky bastards.

Others, and this is me, pour a whole load of words out until we reach a point where we can write no more. We then read what we have produced and wonder what the hell we had been drinking before we started. Honestly, I have never done drugs in my entire life, but reading the first draft of what I write, you would question that rather bold claim. I then start rewriting and editing, to turn it into whatever was in my head when I was writing, but somehow didn’t come out that way onto the page.

Everybody has their own way of reaching the same destination, and I just have to accept that my way of doing things is rather oddball, needs to be written, put to one side, then at a later time, turned into something less likely to attract the attention of a psychiatrist. Social media is therefore not really for me. The occasional post yes, but as a regular thing, well that is likely to go horribly wrong.

I just have to accept that. Unlike authors who tweet several times a day, and chat to you on Facebook, post stuff up on Instagram, the whole rainbow of social media, I would rather sit down with a cup of tea and enjoy writing something that is on my mind, and then I may not have anything else to say for a week, a month, a year even, or I may write two posts in one day. There is no pressure, no clock ticking, and you don’t have to read stuff that was only written because something needed to be written.

That is where a blog comes in. It works just fine for me as long as it isn’t a blog, and nobody expects me to update it. So that is why this is definitely not a blog.