There’s a lot of talk about ‘platform’ and ‘brand’ and ‘voice’, as if these are individual elements that are separate from each other. What I suggest is this: Your platform is your brand is your voice. There is no clear separation of the three. And the heart of this is your blog, which is why…
1 There are many good reasons to blog, but to be a truly effective badass blogger you need a purpose that transcends your own self-interest. 2 Writers (and other creatives) will decide to blog because editors and agents and people like me tell them they need a platform. But if you throw up a blog…
There’s an article in the latest issue of Writer’s Digest that takes you through the “7 steps of starting an author blog”. It’s a helpful article and worth reading. The problem with these articles aimed at writers — particularly fiction writers — particularly unpublished fiction writers who don’t have a following beyond their relatives (and…
1 Before you start your blog, it’s worth asking yourself, What am I going to be passionate enough to write about, day after day after day? Frankly I never bothered (or didn’t know) to ask myself this. I jumped in and started to blog. Although I didn’t think of it as ‘blogging’, maybe because in…
One of the things I didn’t understand when I started my Livejournal four or five years ago was that an author blog is so much more than a way to showcase your writing or promote your books. When other people read your blog, a small number of them will leave comments, which means the reader…
So you’re an author — published or unpublished, doesn’t matter — and you’ve accepted the cold hard truth: you need a blog. Maybe you’re not exactly sure why you need a blog, only that everybody (publishers, editors, agents, your aunt, your landlord, the kid who walks your dog) says you need a blog, and you…
