Tuesday 8 November 2011

Are Blogs the Perfect Writers' Medium?

Amidst the razzle dazzle of Twitter, Facebook and the rest, it is easy to overlook the wonders of the humble blog. For writers they must be the greatest form of communication that the producers of the electronic media have yet presented to us. Now we can be editors and star contributors of our own magazines, writing and publishing the articles that we would normally be trying to persuade others to publish, able to pursue our hobby horses at full gallop and shamelessly plug the work of those we admire.
I have been particularly converted by Morgen Bailey's Writing Blog, (and here it would only be seemly to admit that I have been both interviewed by Morgen http://wp.me/p18Ztn-1e5 and have also written a guest piece http://wp.me/p18Ztn-1fa ).
Regardless of the obvious vested interests at work here, I would still like to sing the praises of blogs such as these. There are companies now who offer to organise "virtual book tours" which, if I have undestood correctly, largely involve people being interviewed or writing about their latest book on other people's blogs in much the same way they would in old fashioned media like television "sofa shows" and the features pages of the old "grey-prints".
Each blog may have no more than a few hundred or a few thousand followers, but then many of the best literary magazines had similarly modest but extremely devoted readerships.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this Andrew. Some of my interviewees have come by way of organised book tours and indeed it's a brilliant way of getting exposure. I've also had small publishers asking the same for their authors and it's a wonderful experience from this side of the 'desk'. I started my blog late March this year because I'd heard it was the thing to do and here we are over 200 authors and 20,000 visits later. It's hard work (because I post 2-3 times a day) but I'm loving every second and to anyone who's considering creating their own I'd say a wholehearted "do it". You get out what you put in so a post a week or more should get some feedback - just make sure that it's something people will want to read and they'll stop long enough to comment and you never know, maybe they'll even come back. :)