It may seem so obvious it doesn’t even need saying: if you’re going to write a blog, then it’s undoubtedly going to give you some practice in writing.
And the longer you keep it up, the better your own writing skills are likely to become, with subtle, day by day improvements. That’s just a standard by-product of doing something over and over again.
But that is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to writing, and the advantages of blogs.
In fact there are several different types of blogs that will be of great help to writers, whether they work mostly in fiction, or write non-fiction as well.
Using A Blog To Generate Ideas
If you’re a fiction writer, keeping a blog can have a two-fold purpose.
Having your own personal blog, where you simply talk about events, people, and things that interest you, can help you subconsciously work through ideas about people’s character and the world you see around you. These explorations can help your fiction, as you refine thoughts about motivations and plot.
Creating A Blog That Can Help Teach Or Give Advice
Another type of blog that can be of help to writers is one written by someone else, that gives them advice or instruction. Some blogs try to teach writing or grammar skills, while others talk about sources of inspiration. Some come at writing from the business side, with agents or editors posting about what a publisher is looking for and how the writer should structure their work.
There are blogs that teach writers how to create a non-fiction book proposal or craft a query for a piece of fiction that will get someone’s attention. There are even sites that offer prompts, challenges, and contests, so that participants can get practical experience writing on a topic, or finishing a piece under deadline.
Using A Blog To Get Your Work Noticed
But a blog isn’t just a place to work out your own personal ideas, or get advice about writing. Many authors have begun to use blogs as places to post the fiction itself. Sending three chapters to an agent or a publisher isn’t the only way of getting one’s fiction noticed any more. Some writers post a couple of early chapters of a new work on a blog, with readers paying a fee if they want to read further.
Other authors post PDFs of their chapters that readers can download for free, as a prelude to buying the physical book when it’s released. Still others read the chapters and post them as a podcast.
Writers who post their work this way and get noticed by and picked up by a publisher are still quite rare, though this sort of thing does happen. But even if they submit their work to an agent or publisher by conventional means, it’s still a mark in their favor if the publisher can see that the writer already has quite a following.
This might indicate that the book could sell rather well if they choose to publish it.
Once the book is published, a blog may play a vital part in the publicity, as the writer posts about the work, posts about the book tour and reading dates, or answers readers’ questions.
Blogs can be an important tool for writers.
Whether they use these sites for developing their own ideas and writing style, for getting writing and publishing advice, or for promoting their own work, blogs can be as important to them as all their other writing and reference tools.
Recent Comments