A Blogging I Will Go

My wife/spouse/life partner is a prodigious blogger.  Go to http://rixarixa.blogspot.com and see for yourself.  Hundreds of people check out her blog daily, and she's received quite a bit of media attention for her work with unassisted homebirth and midwifery.  This morning, a UK-based magazine interviewed her for a couple hours about her dissertation and her experiences.  She's been interviewed other times by newspapers, other magazines, and even received a tentative invite to be on the Today Show.  What I find so unique about her experiences is how her readership developed so organically.  Her blog started off as a site to basically explain some of her research to friends and family who had difficulty understanding some of her decisions.  That initial readership expanded to include several online birth communities and now the mainstream media.  And it all started from a simple blog.

My own experience with blogging (as you can see from my measly, 3-post nascent blog) is limited.  But I think that I'm beginning to see the value and importance of blogging more and more.  Although blogs have been around for years now, they are gaining more and more attention and a larger and larger readership.  It's kind of like the Wild West of blogging.  There are sports blogs, personal blogs, political blogs, birth blogs, blogs about blogs, etc. At the same time that there is a huge proliferation of blogs, there has been a pointed decline in literary readership.  Books, I'm afraid, are less popular than ever.  Commercial publishing houses have consolidated and are constantly looking at ways to cut costs and become more efficient.  Some publishers are forgoing the usual system of earning back an advance and moving to a strictly per-copy-sold contract.  Others, like On Demand Books, a New-York-based company that uses an "Expresso Book Machine" to print books from a digital catalog, are trying to change the way that we currently disseminate the printed work (article about this in the May/June 2007 issue of Poets and Writers).  But all of these are temporary solutions to a changing readership that prefers the short, digital media found on the internet.

So what to do?  I've had two people who've responded to my blog since last week and many more who have read it.  I imagine that with the amount of time and effort that I put into the blog compared to, say, the hours and hours that it takes me to write a polished short story, I will garner a much larger readership than I get from the literary journals I usually publish in.  And publication is immediate.  All I have to do is click "save" and my words are posted online for the whole world wide web to read.  The whole process is somewhat liberating--there is not peer-review, no real censorship, and the readership is so much more diverse than the exclusive world of literary periodicals.  And while there are advantages to the more exclusive literary readership, it's refreshing to have a broader readership.  I'm still reeling about the ability to say whatever the hell I want.

Thoughts?

Comments

[Emmi]

Geez I'm no blogging expert, but I've blogged for quite a while and here's what I learned:

* Strike a balance between having a theme and writing some personal stuff. Without a theme it will be too scattered to be understood, but when I posted all nature stuff on one blog and all stray stuff on my other blog, my readers clearly found it depressing and one-sided. Keep it light sometimes.

* I'm probably biased, but visuals are so important. Use the Vox functions (like "entire neighborhood") and notice what draws you in. Long long paragraphs with no picture scare me away, especially if I'm busy or tired. I prefer to use my own photos whenever possible but creative commons has photos that anyone can use.

-- Just some thoughts!!  :)

[ericfreeze]

Thanks for the advice, Maya.  As a new blogger, I can use all the help I can get.  And thanks for the tip about creative commons!  Now I just need to get to work on making my blog more visually appealing...

[Rob Freeze]

As the not-so-literary-like but engineering geek bro. I have to agree with Maya, pictures will help reach more readers.

[Rob Freeze]

For some reason my full post did not show up, here is the rest. 

I too hesitate to read long paragraphs.  Your blog on blogging makes me want to blog also - it's just another way to pull the world into one community.  As a writer have you thought about writing a book as a blog?  Adding chapters or sections at a time, or possibly a free flowing book written on the fly on the blog like we use to as kids in our school journals?  I would love to do something like that.

[ericfreeze]

Nope, never really thought about doing a blog novel.  What would that be called?  A Blovel?  One thing I would be interested in seeing are digital serialized novels or something like that.  Kind of like back at the turn of the century.  The digital medium, to me, seems like the perfect place to resurrect that form.  But I think you'd need a peer-reviewed journal/publication to make it legit.

[Emmi]

You could pull an Amazon and just post a chapter here and there. I can't imagine a better way to rope people in. Just a few riveting chapters and I'm usually hooked - no leaving the bookstore without the book.

[Rob Freeze]

I think I am going to go for it - organic and free flowing from the literary impared - the other day I came accross the school journal where I went fiction crazy. Perhaps I will post some of them If I can make sense of them.