What is the purpose of an author’s website (that your publisher hasn’t told you about)

In 1913, when twenty-three years old Arthur Wynne created the first crossword puzzle to include in the Christmas edition of New York World he had no idea it was going to be so popular. His first puzzle was nothing like today’s crossword puzzles, but it was still very challenging and engrossing.

But the editors of the New York World didn’t like it. After a few months, when they tried to drop it, readers were so hostile that not only the newspaper had to stick with the puzzle but to make it a permanent feature.

For the next ten years, if you wanted to solve a crossword, you had to buy “The New York World” until one day Richard L. Simon’s aunt wanted a book of crossword puzzles for her daughter. Richard was a publisher. He knew no such book existed. But he saw the opportunity. He negotiated a deal with New York World and bought their best puzzles at $25 a pop and published them in a book form. The book sold 300,000 copies by end of the year.

Sometimes those in business can’t see the obvious just like the editors of the New York World. The publishers are advising the writers to create a website and writers are obliging by creating a static site. Both are failing to see the purpose and potential of an author’s website.

Authors need to have an online presence, full stop.

In today’s world, an author exists because he has a website. But an author’s website is not just a static page with his picture, bio, and the list of his books. An author’s website is a marketing machine. It is the engine room where all the action happens. It is his portfolio, a live resume, a bookstore, a signing venue, a classroom, a sketchbook, and an online diary all put together.

Writers have traditionally stayed away from the publishing and marketing side of things. Many writers are willing to collect hundreds of rejection slips from traditional publishers rather than learn the marketing skills and sell their work.

For some reason there, even in this age of self-publishing and online marketing, the thought of going indie is inconceivable for many. On the flip side, many marketers are writing books and successfully selling thousands of copies. They know something that writers don’t and traditional publishers are failing to see the potential.

Why traditional publishers are failing to see the potential of the author’s websites.

At first, the traditional publishers were too big to care. Their whole focus was to find a few best-sellers a year which gave them enough cashflow. They would take some risk on new writers but never invest enough time to build them into good writers. The new writers were left to their own devices to keep learning, trying, and if they were persistent enough to come up with something decent to be published.

Then came the internet and along with it the ability to self-publish.

Some authors took risks, learned the ropes, and became successful. But not in enough numbers to be a threat to traditional publishing. The printed books were still the main game and winning awards was the only way the writers got any recognition.

Amazon changed the game completely. Introduction of Kindle, followed by Apple’s iBooks (now called Apple Books) and later on Audiobooks set the stage for a complete change-over to happen within a few years.

In all this chaos publishers didn’t get a chance to understand what was happening around them.

Like the editors of New York World they couldn’t see the potential online marketing. They were still at a point where they were advising their authors to have a website while the self-publishers had a readership in thousands and were selling their books directly to them.

Then the publisher started demanding that authors got to have email lists.

The publishers figured out that if an author has a pre-existing mailing list, a percentage of them will buy the book. But they had no strategy in place on how to help or guide the thousands of writers who were still sending their manuscripts to them and had no websites or mailing lists.

A smart business move for the publisher would to work with the budding writers and help them build an online presence and readership. It takes years for a writer to get good at her craft, and it takes years to build a readership. Both can happen in parallel.

If publishers and writers figure out a way to work with each other, in the long run they both will be able to benefit from each other’s efforts.

An author will benefit from a publisher’s backing in creating an author’s website and know-how on how to build an email list.

And a publisher will benefit from having several writers as their protégés who are not only improving their manuscript but also building a readership.

Let’s figure out what is involved with an author’s website?

There is no shortage of advice on what an author’s website should and shouldn’t have. And if you go around looking at what other authors have got, you are bound to get more confused and likely to give up rather than feeling inspired. Starting from highly technical and interactive J K Rowling’s site to very professional sites of Deen Kontz, John Grisham, Gillian Flynn, and Nora Roberts there is so much to leave a new writer bewildered.

Rather than getting bamboozled by all these well-established writers, as a new writer, if you concentrate on three things, you should be able to self-create a site that is interesting, interactive, and professional enough to start your online presence and build your readership.

The three things you should concentrate on are:

1. Information about you
2. Showcasing your work
3. Interacting with your readers

People want to know you before they want to buy your book.

Even quite lately authors were being advised that people don’t come to your site to read about you, they come there to read about your book. That is absolutely wrong advise. Authors were being told, you are important but your books are more important. It is rubbish.

When you go to a library with an array of books to choose from, which one will you pick to borrow? Usually, the one by an author you already know about. Same way, when you are choosing a book to buy, what is the first thing you read after reading the blurb about the book. The author’s bio.

Of course, people are interested to know more about you. They are after all going to spend the next 2 – 4 weeks reading your book. They want to know who you are, what is your background, how did you come to write that book. They are interested as much in your story as they are in the story of your book.

I follow Elizabeth Gilbert, the writer of ‘Eat Pray and Love, on Instagram. Last week she surpassed one million fans. Every feed she puts on Instagram, and she puts 4 to 5 every week, she gets two to three thousand responses. Her fans are not only interested in whatever she shares about her life but engage with her actively.

Your biography doesn’t have to tell your whole life story. But it needs to tell the truth about you. Even if you write under a pen name, whatever you tell in your bio needs to be honest and true.

Another thing you need to be aware of is that your bio not really about you. It is about your readers. When your reader reads it they should be able to relate to it. My own bio which is just four paragraphs long talks about my struggles with becoming a good writer and how a change of mindset from a martyr to a trickster made writing fun for me. Something each struggling writer can relate to.

The purpose of your website is to showcase your work.

Of course, the first purpose of your website is to showcase your books. You got to give enough coverage to your book on your website. Whenever you publish a new book, you can make it the centerpiece of your website. David Sedaris does it well on his site.

You have a book to sell; you need to make sure people know where to buy it. If a reader visits your site and doesn’t realize immediately that you’re an author with a book to sell, you’re probably doing something wrong. The buttons like “Pre-order now” steer readers to order your book even before it is published.

But your website could also be a place to showcase your work. Austin Kleon the writer of the book ‘Show Your Work’ publishes a post each day on his blog where he showcases whatever art he did that day. All his learning, reading, and writing go on his blog first and then go into his books. He has thousands of fans who are hungry to consume whatever he puts on his website. His is a very simple blog-style site that is easy to maintain but full of great content.

Your blog provides the opportunity to stay in contact with your readers.

It is your interaction with the readers that will get your books sold. A blog is a great medium to be able to do that.

Imagine getting an email from J K Rowlings once a week telling you what she has been up to, how her new book is going, and bits and pieces about her writing process. Maybe she sends you a couple of chapters from her new book. Maybe she wants to enroll a few beta-readers. Wouldn’t you want to be on her mailing list? And when finally her book is ready to be published would you buy it or would you say, Umh…, aah…, I will think about it. Of course, you will buy it. You will even pre-order.

You get the point.

But the biggest problem an author has that they have no clue what to write in their blog each week. And publishers are no help. They are so far behind in this game.

Your blog is a letter you write to your fans each week. There is a number of things you can cover in this letter.

You can tell your readers what are you reading, what intrigued you and what have you learned from it.

You can write reviews and recommend books.

You can teach something. Most of the readers want to become writers themselves.

Weekly emails with bite-size learnings make very welcoming blog posts.

But most importantly you can share your process of creation. People have an insatiable desire to know how real authors work.

But I can’t create and maintain a website. I am not technical.

If you can learn to use a computer, learn to do research on the internet, you can also learn to create and maintain a website and a blog. It is just a piece of software, that is interactive and user friendly like any other. Besides, there is a lot of help available online.

YouTube has thousands of videos that can teach you how to build a website and start a blog. You just need to spend fifteen minutes a day and within a week you will be able to create a decent website using a free template.

Too much to absorb, let me explain it in short.

An author’s website is to an author what a printing press is to a publisher. You ought to have one. But you do not have to be bamboozled by the professional sites of established authors. You can start small. And if you can concentrate on three things initially, you can have a firm mechanism not only to sell your books but build a loyal readership while you are writing them. Those three things are:

1. Your bio
2. Your work
3. Your blog

You have a choice, you can either wait for a publisher to find you or you can make yourself findable.

Publishers are fast becoming a dying breed. Now it is up to each individual author to sell their work. And the starting point for that is a website. Don’t delay it any longer. Sooner you will start, the quicker you will get better.

Still have a lot of questions?

Should I have my name as the domain name or should I create a site based on my book title?

If I hire someone to create a website how much it will cost?

How long it will take me to attract the first 100 readers?

How much time I will need to spend each week to write the blog?

How many articles I need to write a week?

Send me your questions and I will create a Frequently Asked Questions guide for you.

Also, I am working on a step by step guide to build your website for yourself. Stay tuned for that.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

Turning a blog into a book

Earlier this week I disappointed Life Story Blogging participants ( a three-month course I am conducting at the University of Third Age ) when I told them that publishers won’t accept their content for a book when it is already published on a blog. It won’t be considered as ‘fresh’ or ‘unpublished work, which is what most of the publishers are looking for when they select a manuscript.

But then there are so many writers who are publishing books based on their blogs. Some books came into being only because the blogs became immensely famous. Books like Julie and Julia and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck come to mind.

Blogging has changed the writing industry forever.

The Internet allows anyone with a computer and an internet connection to be an author. Thousands of bloggers around the world are writing their thoughts and experiences and sharing them with the world through blogs. They do not have to go through the same agony of collecting rejection slips as authors used to do before the age of the internet. Today many writers are earning their living through just blogging.

A lot of effort goes into writing good content for a blog.

Your effort doesn’t have to go wasted. Your blog is a repository of the work you did for years and chances are not all the people have read all your work. You can turn it into a book. It has been proven over time, that it doesn’t matter how easy it is to read on screen, people like the convenience and condenseness of a book.

You can select a theme from your blog and turn the relevant articles into a book.

I have several themes going on in my blog which is just eighteen months old. I have been diligently saving my articles into relevant categories. If I continue to build them the way I have so far, in not so distant future, I will have enough material for three or four books.

Alternatively, you can turn the whole blog into a book in its entirety.

That is what I intend to do with the blog I have started with my Life Story Blogging course participants to write stories from my early life. At some point, I intend to turn that whole blog into a book.

Why should you turn your blog into a book?

Because you should be paid for your work.

The internet has conditioned us to expect everything for free. Remember the days when you used to buy newspapers, magazines, and books. Now everyone expects to read them for free. That is the reason so many writers continue to provide good stuff for free. But the good stuff should never be for free.

Self-publishing is the way to get paid for your work.

There are several tools available that can turn your blog into books

As I was researching it, a very timely article popped up in my inbox by Desiree Johnson, a content specialist for Bluehost (the hosting service I use for my website), listing a number of tools that can turn your blog into a book.

Here they are, as summarised by Desiree Johnson:

Into Real Pages is the easiest tool that allows you to import your blog directly to their website and create a book out of it. You can choose which type of book you want to produce. You can customize your cover and further customize your content after it has been uploaded. Prices start at $26.50 for a softcover book with forty pages.

PixxiBook provides a similar service with support for a wider range of hosting services including Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, Squarespace and Wix. However, it doesn’t allow you to customize your content and cover after it has been uploaded. Their pricing starts at $40.00 for fifty pages.

BlookUp offers one of the most versatile services in terms of which content can be imported and made into a book. They support blogging standards upheld by Tumblr, WordPress, and Blogger, and they also support creating books from your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter content. Like PixxiBook, BlookUp only produces hardcover books. You can customize your cover, similar to both Into Real Pages and PixxiBook. Books created from blogs via BlookUp start at $25.00 for one hundred pages.

Into Real Pages, PixxiBook, and BlookUp all specialize in single books.

If you are looking for self-publishing your book and need multiple copies you need to look at different tools.

BlogBooker lets you import your blog, much like Into Real Pages, PixxiBook, or BlookUp, but instead of a printed book, you receive a book-format PDF. They allow you to import content from Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Ghost, Medium, TypePad, and Twitter. Pricing starts at $18.90 for four unlimited-length BlogBooks.

48 Hour Books prints books in bulk. While you cannot import your blog directly to 48 Hour Books, you can import a PDF. 48 Hour Books provides an enormous amount of options that extend well beyond paperback versus hardback. Pricing starts at $13.70 per book for basic paperbacks of fifty pages, and there is a minimum order of ten books. You can also purchase an ISBN and barcode from 48 Hour Books for $125.00 each (paperback, hardback, ePub, etc.).

BookBaby is a managed service that offers whatever you might need to become a published author. Their services include (but are not limited to) editing, professional cover design, ISBN’s and barcodes, and even Facebook and Instagram Ads optimized for authors. BookBaby provides all these services and more in a package called “Complete Self-Publishing Package.” This services package contains everything you will need to do if you decide to self-publish including twenty-five custom-printed books, direct-to-reader sales, and worldwide distribution. Pricing for BookBaby’s Complete Self-Publishing Package starts at $1,699.00 (keep in mind that all prices are in US dollars).

Here you go, something to keep in mind when you are ready to publish your work. Keep in mind you need to proofread your final version before turning it into a printed version. It might be a good idea to engage a professional proofreader if you intend to sell it.

Whether you are looking to turn your blog into a book for a coffee table conversation piece or as a record for your family history or you want to become the next bestselling author there are tremendous resources readily available to do just that.

Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

Should writers blog?

First of all, let’s establish what is a blog.

‘Blog’ is the short version of the term ‘weblog’ which refers to online journals. Starting just twenty years ago blogs are like mini websites where people publish their opinions, stories, and other writings as well as photos and videos. As the web has grown and changed, blogs have gained more recognition and merit.

Almost ten years ago, when blogging was just taking off, the general view was that authors, both fiction and non-fiction, should have blogs in order to gather an audience and build relationships with readers. Now, this view is challenged.

Let’s not kid anyone. Blogging takes a lot of time and time is a rare commodity for writers.

You need to come up with ideas for content and publish regularly preferably weekly. You also need to learn the technology, search engine optimization and other jargon which is a challenge in itself.

Jane Friedman, a full-time writer working in the publishing industry, warns about the investment it takes to blog:

“As with any form of writing, it takes a considerable investment of energy and time to do it right and get something from it.”

A writer, P. S. Hoffman published an article in Writer’s Digest 5 Ways an Author Blog Could Kill Your Writing. He warns that blogging will not only steal your valuable writing time but will build ‘wrong’ writing skills, will not help you much with selling your books but instead will stand in the way of finishing your writing project – your book.

But in response to the same article, Stephanie Chandler, another writer, wrote:

I built my author platform with a blog, so I have to disagree with this as blanket advice. One of the biggest benefits a blog brings is website traffic. Statistically, the more often you blog, the more traffic your site will receive. And if your site is working to cultivate an audience instead of just trying to sell books (there’s a big difference between building a tribe and just trying to sell one book at a time), then traffic matters. Traffic also matters to publishers.

For nonfiction writers, a blog helps establish authority in your field and attract readers based on keyword concentration. My blog has brought me countless media interviews, traditional publishing deals, and corporate sponsors. Blogging established me as an influencer.

I am more in line with Stephanie Chandler’s views. Here are my 5 reasons why blogging will benefit any writer.

1. Blogging is the best way to become a fluent writer, find your voice, and bring clarity to your thoughts.

I have grown more as a writer in the past eighteen months than I did in the past eighteen years of writing journals, short stories, memoirs and even the first draft of a novel.

I have put aside all other writing projects to give full attention to blogging.

Blogging might be different from other published writing, but it is not in any way “lesser-writing” or “less-labor-intensive.”

Your posts can be less formal, less researched, and more conversational, but writing them still requires the same kind of practice and skill as crafting a novel. The more you do it, the better you get. And if done right and seriously, all the writing you do for your blog can have another life as a book or in another format.

2. Blogs are gardens for ideas.

Marc Weidenbaum in his post Bring Out Your Blogs uses a garden as a metaphor for blogs. Like a gardener, you plant ideas like seeds in a blog and then watch which one grows to become healthy plants and which one never germinates.

Austin Kleon considers blogs as a thinking place for artists, somewhere to try out their half-baked thoughts and work on them till they are fully formed. In his book Keep Going he writes:

My blog has been my sketchbook, my studio, my gallery, my storefront and my salon. Absolutely everything good that has happened in my career can be traced back to my blog. My books, my art shows, my speaking gigs, some of my best friendships

[…]

Fill your website with your work, your ideas and the stuff you care about. Stick with it, maintain it and let it change with you over time.

3. Blogging helps you connect with like-minded people.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, you soon will, that writing is a lonely profession. Blogging helps you build your own community of people who like to read what you like to read. They become your first readers because they are already reading and liking, what you are writing.

If you are new to writing and want to be in there for a long haul, you need to blog. That is not only to get better at writing but also to connect with like-minded people.

For the first few years, it might feel like you are blogging for yourself and no one else is reading or care whether or not you blog. These are good years. Be thankful for that because during this time you will make all the mistakes and figure out what works and what doesn’t.

In time, your audience will discover you. You got to give yourself time, though, and stick it out. Many people give up after a year or two of random blogging. Think of it as a five-year plan at least. Don’t worry, blogging will become really easy by then. The first 1000 blog posts are difficult, after that they become really easy, says Seth Godin, who has posted more than 7000 posts and never missed a day.

4. A Blog is your own publishing house.

As a beginning writer, it is very difficult to get your work published. The old publishing model is dying, publishing houses are losing money, so they are very careful with whose work they should publish next. They normally like to stick with known authors.

That doesn’t mean they won’t publish your book. They will if you already have a readership and a mailing list. A blog helps you get both.

Besides, what good is your book if no one is reading it and it is just sitting in the bottom drawer of your study table or on your hard disc? Why not self-publish it on your blog as an e-book and start the next one?

If you are not publishing anything, that means no one is reading any of your writing. Blogging allows you to start small and build a readership. Even if a few people read your articles, they are being read.

Besides, weekly publishing of posts gives you the practice of self-editing and meeting deadlines.

5. You never know where blogging will take you

In 2002, a 30-year-old secretary from Queens, New York, broke the monotony of her life by preparing — in the course of one year — the 525 recipes in “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” by the legendary cook Julia Childs. She also blogged about it.

Julie Powell became so popular that she turned it into a book that later became a movie, Julie and Julia starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams and end up winning several awards.

Absolutely everything good that has happened in my career can be traced back to my blog. My books, my art shows, my speaking gigs, some of my best friendships – they all exists because I have my own little piece of turf on the Internet.

Austin Kleon in Keep Going

All said and done, you do not have to blog, and if you have little interest in the form.

If you don’t find any joy in the activity, and it is constantly killing your creativity and stressing you out, then please don’t pursue it. Choose other social media options.

Social media is widely accepted as a powerful marketing tool for writers. You can choose anything you are comfortable with – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Goodreads. Many authors are using one or more of these platforms successfully. Elizabeth Gilbert doesn’t blog, but she is on Facebook, Twitter and, Instagram every day sometimes two to three times a day.

Charlie Mackesy shared every sketch on Instagram and build a vast audience even before his book The boy, the mole, the fox, and the Horse was published late last year. The book was an instant hit and is nominated for various awards.

In a nutshell, a blog could be a powerful platform for new writers if they enjoy blogging and will invest the time and effort it requires. If it is something you care little about, you shouldn’t force yourself, just chose one of the other social media platforms to suit your style of communication.

Photo by Arnel Hasanovic on Unsplash

Why have a platform?

Dear Creative Souls,

I have been writing for twenty years now. In those years, I have filled countless diaries, notebooks, digital files, and online apps. I was writing for myself and never thought of publishing anything.

As I got a bit better at writing, a tiny desire to share some of my writings with others started lifting its head.

But I am too scared to send any of my short stories to the competition. My novel needs at least three for four serious rewrites, and my diaries are personal. What can I share?

That is when I came across Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work in which he describes the importance of having a platform.

A platform is a medium through which you share your ideas and your work. It can be physical (a gallery, a salon…) or digital (blog, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook…), although in today’s age digital is preferred because of its reach and affordability.

Austin wrote:

More than ten years ago, I staked my own little Intrnet claim and bought the domain name austinkleon.com. I was a complete ameture with no skills when I began building my website: It started off bare bones and ugly. Eventually, I figured out how to install a blog, and that changed everything. A blog is an ideal machine to turn the flow into stock. One post is nothing on its own. Publish a thousand posts in a decade and it turns out into your life’s work.

[…]

My books, my art shows, my speaking gigs, some of my best friendships – they all exists because I have a my own little piece of turf on the internet.

That advice was the inspiration for the start of this blog. Since last year, I started sharing my work and my learnings on this blog. It has completely changed my perspective on my craft. I am writing better, learning faster and feeling a sense of accomplishment I never felt before.

If you are really interested in sharing your work and expressing yourself nothing beats owning your own space online, a place that you control, a place that no one can take away from you, a place where people can always find you.

Carving out a space for yourself online, somewhere where you can express yourself and share your work is still one of the best possible investments you can make with your time.

Andy Baio, a technologist and blogger. 

Your blog can be your sketchbook, your studio, your gallery, your storefront, and your salon.

It is like a shopfront.

It will be a place where you can be yourself. You can reveal the part of you which not even your family knows about. Your secret yearnings, your desires, your dreams.

Don’t think of it as a self-promoting machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. Online you can become a person you really wanted to be. Fill your website with your work and your ideas and stuff you care about. Social media trends will come and go but blog and email have been around since the beginning of the internet and are here to stay.

[…]

Over years you will be tempted to abandon it for the newest, shiniest, social network. Don’t give in. Don’t let it fall into neglect. Think about it for the long term. Stick with it, maintain it and let it change it with you over time. Whether people show up or they don’t, you’re out there, doing your thing, ready whenever they are.

Austin Kleon

Blogging is a simple strategy that the new age creatives use to build a name for themselves which overtime becomes their most valuable asset.

This kind of blogging is different from professional blogging where you are wanting to earn money from blogging. It is more in line with the advice the great writer and visual artist William Burroughs gave to Patti Smith, a singer, songwriter, musician, author, and poet

Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work… and if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.

William Burroughs

I am not sure whether you have given it a thought or not yet but you need a platform too. Every creative person does.

Let me know when you build one. I would love to visit it.

Photo by Matthias Wagner on Unsplash

Thirty posts in 30 days

It is a confessional post today so bear with me, please.

Yesterday marked the end of a personal challenge I set for myself, to send a post out every day for a month. I nailed it!

Many months ago, I set myself a similar challenge, to share something every day, but failed. At that time I was aiming for 200 to 500 words only, in a rambling style. This time I averaged 1000 words per post and wrote magazine style articles. I am really pleased with myself.

Why it was so important to meet this challenge?

It is the start of my blogging life in the true sense (I am not counting previous attempts here), and I want to make sure that I set myself a routine to write, research, review and publish regularly. There were days when I didn’t get any time during the day, on those days I stayed up very late finishing the posts. There were days when my eyes hurt so much (I have chronic dry eyes) but I persisted. I had to create these memories so when in the future I feel like slacking, I have this positive experience to draw from. If I could do it then, I can do it now. It is very important to have examples from our own past to motivate ourselves.

Another reason I set this challenge up was to accelerate my learning. The more I wrote the easier it became. I learned how to research a topic, how to dig out my own opinion, how to present it in a simple way and most importantly how to find topics that I though will interest you as much as they interest me. Your comments showed me I was hitting the nail sometimes. Other times I was not so sure. Bloggers rely on their readers to direct them to what they should write. You are the reason I write. I want to contact you and want to know what is worrying you. How can I help? Is there any topic you would like my research and present my views? I would like to know your views too. So please leave me comments, however small.

I really enjoyed writing articles on my travels. Every traveler notices different things when they visit a new place. I hope you learned something new from my account. Writing about them doubled my enjoyment of traveling because I was paying more attention to everything. Besides, it engaged my family members too, prompting me to take pictures, collecting brochures and proofreading posts.

Where to from here?

I am in blogging for a long haul. I love this platform. It is the most appropriate platform for a writer where you can not only practice your craft but share your learning with others and build a community of shared interests. Writing, which is a very solitary activity otherwise, becomes a medium to win friends. And I believe we all need more like-minded friends regardless of the distance.

I have discovered that the most productive way to work form me is to have monthly goals. I get too many ideas. As the proverb goes, time to act on an idea is while it is still hot, I get too much excited and want to work on all of them straightaway. The compromise I have made is to stick with an idea at least a month. Hence monthly projects.

My next project is going to be from 15 July – 15 August (for some reason my project month is starting halfway through calendar months) and it is going to be working on my novel. I started it five years ago and intended to finish it this year so that I can start the next one in January next year. I haven’t touched it for eighteen months now. It is time I bring its characters out of their exile.

I will still be publishing regularly, at least three times a week, more if I find something interesting that can’t wait. I thank my stars every day having born at a time in history when so much is at our fingertips, literary.

By the way, I have profiled myself based on Nina Katchadourian art exercise I introduced in my yesterday’s post How to use your inflight time to create art? Here are three piles of books addressing three traits of myself: learning, traveling and becoming new me.

The art of learning big magic.
The writer’s journey in Patagonia
Line by line breaking the habit of being yourself

I hope you will also give it a go.

Next post on Wednesday

PS: I am working on the Patagonia post I promised in Lake District – Chile and Argentina post.

Twentieth anniversary of ‘blogs’

The year 2019 marks the twentieth anniversary when the word ‘blog’ was officially accepted in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Even if you consider the history of the internet, it is not so long ago. Then again, it’s only in the past five to ten years that they have really taken off and have become an important part of the online landscape.

That got me intrigued, so I went digging. A Brief History of Blogging post has lots of interesting information:

“It’s generally recognized that the first blog was Links.net, created by Justin Hall, while he was a Swarthmore College student in 1994. Of course, at that time they weren’t called blogs, and he just referred to it as his personal homepage.

It wasn’t until 1997 that the term “weblog” was coined. The word’s creation has been attributed to Jorn Barger, of the influential early blog Robot Wisdom. The term was created to reflect the process of “logging the web” as he browsed.

1998 marks the first known instance of a blog on a traditional news site when Jonathan Dube blogged Hurricane Bonnie for The Charlotte Observer.

“Weblog” was shortened to “blog” in 1999 by programmer Peter Merholz. It’s not until five years later that Merriam-Webster declares the word their word of the year.

The original blogs were updated manually, often linked from a central home page or archive. This wasn’t very efficient, but unless you were a programmer who could create your own custom blogging platform, there weren’t any other options, to begin with.

During these early years, a few different “blogging” platforms cropped up. LiveJournal is probably the most recognizable of the early sites.

And then in 1999, the platform that would later become Blogger was started by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan at Pyra Labs. Blogger is largely responsible for bringing blogging to the mainstream.”

It’s 20 years since the birth of the word blog, if not of the act. During these twenty years technologies, kept coming and going. It was all about the web first, then AOL, then “push,” then Web 2.0, then the email was “dead.” Then came social media, newsletters, Slacks, and podcasts.

Throughout, blogs just stayed quietly in the background. Self-publishing is at the heart of the healthy internet. It’s truly self-publishing when the URL and the means of production are your own,” wrote Marc Weidenbaum in his blog Disquiet.

Marc Weidenbaum urges, “If you garden, blog it (please). If you have a pet monkey, blog it. If you are the repository of some dwindling or otherwise threatened culture, blog it. If you harbor considered thoughts about your profession, blog it.”

Blogs are gardens for ideas. Like a gardener, you plant ideas in a blog and then watch which one grows to become a healthy plant and which one never germinate. You learn how to prepare the ground, which makes them grow, and how to protect them from predators.

Blogging is a must for aspiring writers. You will grow and refine as a writer much quicker than you would write in your journals and diaries. You can still be writing for yourself but only better. The act of hitting the publish button at the end of the day’s writing improves your writing many times. Get a small blog growing in a corner somewhere in the vast land of the Internet and write. Don’t worry about page views, don’t bother with SEOs, or social media promotions, just write.

Blogs are thinking place for artists, somewhere to try out their half-baked thoughts and work on them till they are fully formed. Austin Kleon writes in his book Keep Going:

A blog is the ideal machine for turning flow into stock: One little blog post is nothing on its own, but publish a thousand blog posts over a decade, and it turns into your life’s work. My blog has been my sketchbook, my studio, my gallery, my storefront and my salon. Absolutely everything good that has happened in my career can be traced back to my blog. My books, my art shows, my speaking gigs, some of my best friendships – they all exists because I have my own little piece of turf on the Internet.

Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. Online, you can become the person you really want to be. Fill your website with your work, your ideas and the stuff you care about. Stick with it, maintain it and let it change with you over time.

The beauty of owning your own turf is that you can do whatever you want with it.

Have you been blogging? What are your thoughts about blogging? I would like to know about your blogging journey. Share it with me through the comments section below.

Photo by Francesco Gallarotti on Unsplash