Your blogging is profoundly creative. I read your posts and see you honing skills that are genuinely impressive — already highly developed, getting even better. Your blog content is very, very different from your fiction, and in no way does your blog feel like a marketing vehicle.

I think in part I’m reacting to the marketing aspect of the author platform. I don’t like being sold to. And I definitely don’t like the idea that editors and agents will use the lack of a blog as an excuse to not consider an author’s work for publication.

I’m very goal-oriented in my thinking about this: what’s the goal, what’s the best way of getting there? You’re very process-oriented: blog-writing is another aspect of your writing and your interests, each kind of writing nourishes the other, it all works together to move you along in your development as a writer and establish an audience for your books. I really can’t argue with that.

There’s a certain synergistic effect of efforts like this: no one marketing component seems to be very effective by itself, but taken together they can move the market. A friend who worked in advertising told me once that people need to be reminded three times about a product before they buy. I also recall a story the very first builder I worked for told me, when I asked him whether the display ad he ran in the local newspaper generated much work for him. He told me that in twenty years he had never gotten a job from this ad, but during the one period when he pulled the ad from the paper, a couple of dozen people he came across in social situations asked him whether he had gone out of business. When he asked them why they thought that, they told him that they had noticed his ad had disappeared.

I love Justine’s blog, and I tell people about it and recommend it to people. At a certain tipping point, some of these people are going to buy her books. We’re all looking for filters, and loving someone’s blog-writing is a better filter than most when trying to decide whose writing to spend actual money on. I have people in my life — my father, for example — that, when they recommend a book, I buy it. (Of course, I’m always recommending Jim Harrison to people, and they inevitably hate his writing. I could be the worst marketing tool he’s got out there.)

It’s also obvious that someone could tie Justine to a chair and duct-tape her fingers together and she would find a way to blog and Tweet. This is a medium that completely suits her as a creative outlet, entirely apart from its usefulness as a marketing platform. I’m glad for that. In pre-digital times, it was virtually impossible to get a hold of this kind of work from a writer you liked — it was considered apocrypha and was published posthumously. I remember, years ago, finding by chance the published diary Jim Harrison kept while he wrote Dalva. This was, essentially, a series of blog posts in the time before blogs — informal, loosely-structured, highly personal, genre-less, utterly fascinating and engaging. And, by the way, a great advertisement for his book, had it been published ahead of the novel — just as Justine’s writing about The Decadents is a great advertisement.

This is a good topic. Insert smiley face here.

Another thing I know is that while reading through five years’ worth of posts from my old blog this evening, I was struck by the realization that I’m just not having very much fun at my new blog. Some of my older material has a liveliness to it that I haven’t been able to muster, and that’s a real problem. I suspect that my experiment of a narrowly-focused blog about writing and writing-related topics may be drawing to a close. As Justine mentions, that’s part of finding the “right-for-[me] way of engaging in the process,” just like the right-for-me answers I mentioned. The blog will continue, but what I choose to post will be different. I suspect I’ll return to my patented Conceptual Train Wreck format.

(BTW, the post in your link belongs to Lynn Viehl, all I did was comment on it.)

Also, there is a very tiny smiley face in the bottom left corner of this comments page. Keep your eye on it. It looks sneaky.

Yes, I *do* think a lot about this stuff because I like to, it’s fun and stimulating for me…Which doesn’t mean that you have to (part of the value I can bring to the conversation is, hopefully, that you & others won’t have to undergo the same kind of learning and trial-and-error process I’m still undergoing…)

More and more I think an effective author platform — fuck it, I’m just going to start saying ‘author wave’ from now on — is integral to the person…It is whatever you can’t pay someone else to do for you…Which means you have to find some way to make it relevant and meaningful for you in and of the process itself, if you know what I mean….Yes, publishers will say that you absolutely need a blog in this day and age (and more), but if you can’t find a way to do it that fully engages you and makes it a meaningful use of your time — and thus the reader’s — you might as well not bother, because it *will* be a waste of time.

Blogging, for me, is a form of social networking & a kind of ongoing workshop…I was in the YA section of the bookstore the other day and ticking off to my boyfriend all the author names I recognized (on the front tables) from the interactions I’ve had online…That interaction & conversation & relationship-building has become a huge reason why I’m online in the first place (although it wasn’t when I started for the simple reason that I just didn’t know).

You *can’t* blog just to promote yourself & your books. (I mean, you can, but you won’t get many readers that way.) You have to find something you’re passionate about, something you want to learn more about (‘the best way to learn something is to teach it…’). After all, a person cannot live by fiction-writing alone; we need to feed our fiction with a continuing stream of curiosity and stimulation and knowledge. Blogging can do that.

Again, you’re not selling books or doing PR, certainly not in the traditional sense; you’re creating an experience for the reader (and yourself) that becomes an author-branded experience because of who you are and what you represent…I need to think about this a little more in order to clarify it better…

I guess what I’m saying is: you’ll know you’ve found your own individual right-for-you way of engaging in the process when you are so jazzed by what you’re doing that you no longer feel the need to ask these questions, because ‘creating an author wave’ is about so much more than just self-promotion (and in any case demands a different way of thinking about ‘self-promotion’).

Glad you found this blog too!

What Paul said. :)

Some of these are midlife questions. At my age (I’m 44), I look back and realize just how much time I’ve wasted, and how bizarrely misplaced my focus was. I never for a second thought I was focusing on the wrong things, but too often I was. I was not nearly as smart about this stuff as I thought I was. I frequently find myself asking myself Colin Marshall’s question: how is this choice I’m making penalizing my future self?

By the way, Ian, this post of yours in your blog is priceless. Justine, I’d love to hear your thoughts:

http://www.genreality.net/the-reality-of-a-times-bestseller

I think it’s easier to avoid that if you start building your platform/treehouse/Sarlacc pit before you’ve got something to sell. That way you learn about blogging/twittering/whatevering for it’s own sake. I’ve been blogging since 2002 and built my current, more writing-focused site in 2008. The latter is purpose-driven, but it’s not really a pushing tool because I haven’t got much in the way of “product” to push.

That said, being…let’s say, “lightly published”…makes identifying my own contributory value more problematic. So far I’ve just been writing what I write, hoping that my observations of my situation will resonate with or be helpful to people in similar situations. Still, over the past several days I’ve had to counsel myself, “Patience!” because had I lost sight of why I was blogging and it started to feel phony and pointless.

Dan–I had a piece of flash fiction posted on McSweeney’s in May that began life as a Facebook update. Since then it’s been translated into Spanish and published (in a magazine printed on real paper made from dead trees) in Mexico and Spain. I got paid for it, too, at an excellent per-word rate. I also have a couple of works in progress that started out as blog posts. So I’d say that my own “unpredictable outcome” has been pretty good so far.

I think it’s a matter of discovering which kind of writing generates creative flow and force, and that will change from day to day. Lately my blog has been a distraction, and I’ve had to loosen up a bit and get silly with it. Now it’s fun again and gives me ideas, instead of being serious and draining.

I’m glad you’ve chosen to devote some of your attention to writing your blog. I benefit, happily.

New skills: we’ve spoken of your trying to incorporate some stylistic and structural elements that work so well in your blog posts into your fiction.