Thanks for your advice. I found a link to your website from the shark – Janet Reid. I feel like I have so much to learn before I start the query process, and I appreciate her knowledge and your knowledge. I’m listening and learning and will hopefully get the query process right.

So I’ll continue to blog at my own pace and see what happens, but I kind of feel like my “platform building strategy” at this point in time — since I haven’t published anything yet — hinges upon me functioning as a listener instead of a talker. Connecting with readers by showing an interest in them, instead of begging for their attention to me. Like maybe if Dale Carnegie had written a book about social media, haha. 🙂

I’ve been reading a lot lately how blogging does very little for fiction writers. If I wrote non-fiction, it would be perfect. Or if I had a service to sell, it might work.

Somewhere in the future, I’ll probably stop blogging and make my site static with updates a few times a year. But for now, I’ll do my sporadic blogging.

You made several good points, and although I love blogging, it does cut into my actual writing time.

In response to the writer who is blogging about theology but writes juvenile fiction – yes, it’s too big a gap. The folks who are reading your current blog are not even close to your target market for juvenile fiction.

That said, you could easily have two different pages on Facebook to accommodate those different audiences and drive engagement.

However, and this is key, if you like blogging then to hell with all the rules. Do it! Enjoy it. Revel in the words. Have a great time interacting with like-minded people about something you have a passion for.

At the end of the day, isn’t that what we writers love? To touch other people’s hearts and minds, even when we’re removed by time and place?

I am sticking to weekly blog posts for now because, while my audience is small, there’s some immediate gratification and direct connection with my readers that I enjoy. Every now and then I run into someone who never comments on my blog but always knows what I’ve posted and can speak intelligently about it, so that’s kind of nice. Sometimes I get stumped on what to write about, but I think it’s a good exercise to try to come up with something fast.

I started an author blog (http://www.greglevin.com/scrawl-space-blog) two years ago — about six months before my second novel (first GOOD one) came out. Blogging has been great for attracting potential fans/readers to my site, but I’m very careful not to over-promote my books in my blog posts. I write satirical and humorous pieces about what it’s like to be an author. Some of my posts are geared more toward writers; others are for any and everyone… who is literate and over the age of 17.

I post bi-weekly to avoid burnout, and to avoid annoying my subscribers. I find blogging to be a great way to keep the words coming while taking a break from whatever beast of a novel I’m working on. It takes me 8-10 months to finish writing a novel; it takes me only 3-4 hours to finish writing a blog post. It feels good to cross finish lines on a frequent basis while busy climbing the mountain of a manuscript.

One last thing, if it weren’t for my author blog (which I share on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn after each post), I may not have ever met the TV producer who ended up getting HBO (yes HBO!) to option my latest novel (‘The Exit Man’) for development into a TV series. (The pilot script is currently being written by a well-known Hollywood scriptwriter. Fingers crossed!)

So, as an author, do I think blogging is worth it? H*LL yeah!

Thanks again for the post, Rachelle. Keep up the great content.

Best,

Greg Levin