Two things happened this week. One, I got up at 3:45 AM on Thursday to listen to Jane Friedman’s seminar on blogging, and second, I got into a very interesting discussion with a group of friends on Whatsapp.
More than two years of blogging, and I am still learning about the craft. Blogging has changed so much in the past five to seven years. No longer it is a web diary to write about one’s hobbies and passions but a strategic tool to develop a brand and build a following.
“Blogging is not critical for every author and you don’t have to do it,” said Jane, “so if you’re eager to be let off the hook, you have permission to ignore blogging altogether.”
But then she goes on to add:
But blogging does remain one of the most straightforward paths to build and engage a readership over the long term, at least for writers. Blogging, at its core, is a special genre of writing and can be a wonderful creative outlet that doubles as one of your marketing superpowers.
But for blogging to have a real payoff for your career or author business, it has to be done with a particular strategy in mind and executed with some discipline.
In the two years, I have spent thousands of dollars, attended countless courses, and invested an insane number of hours to build my little turf on the internet. Yet I am nowhere near the nirvana.
As I was contemplating the countless mistakes I have made in my short blogging career, a friend of mine, Sean D’Souza, posted a list of products (mostly ebooks and courses) he had created and sold through his website in the past twenty years. It was an impressive list.
I probably would have delivered a similar number of projects in twenty years of my corporate and public career but they are nowhere to be seen. They certainly are not generating income the way Sean’s products still are. I could have written twenty books in twenty years and they would have amounted much more than the work I did working for others.
We have a tendency to look at things that didn’t work in our lives.
But “things that didn’t work” are the stepping stones to “things that did work.”
Sean told a story about going through his cartoon diaries because people kept telling him that he needed to make a book out of those. He was having a hard time finding what to include and what not.
Then he remembered, once, one of his clients was so happy looking at the blank and unfinished pages in his diary. He couldn’t figure out why. But he does now. It is that kind of stuff we don’t see. All the unfinished work, the sketches, the crumpled paper. They are the stepping stones to the finished work.
If we don’t have a decent amount of bad work, we’ll never have good work. If we don’t attend bad webinars and courses and workshops, we don’t know what good ones are like. If we don’t make mistakes we will never achieve anything.
Our passions become obsessions. We spend an insane amount of energy doing things we love to do. We may never get the rewards for our labor but we do get the satisfaction of action. Then Kinky Friedman’s words say it all.
My dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you.
Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.
Let it kill you and let it devour your remains.
For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.
Falsely yours
Kinky Friedman
This week I wrote two articles, How to make your writing memorable, poetic, and persuasive, and How to Structure Your Novel both I have been wanting to write for some times. Hope they are helpful.
That is it from me this week.
Talk to you next week.
Take care.
Photo by Reza Hasannia on Unsplash