Time for Some Pulse-Taking
It would appear to be time to re-think the whole blog thing.
I mean, blogging for fiction writers is kind of tough. You know?
Conventional wisdom says indie writers need a website, a landing page for people to find their books. That’s not necessarily the same as a blog.
The idea with a blog is to provide content for readers, many of whom follow the blog and interact with the writer. Ideally, enough readers find the blog for whatever reason and become fans of the writer’s work. They click on links for the author’s books and take advantage of the promotions the author offers.
If one is a non-fiction writer, the blog should show readers that the writer is an expert in his/her subject. But if one is a fiction writer, the blog should show that the writer is engaging and interesting, that the author knows how to write and focuses on subjects the reader finds appealing.
But what does the fiction writer post in order to send this message? Short stories? Novel excerpts? I’ve done some of those. They don’t get much traffic. Posts about the writing process? I’ve done some of those. They don’t get much traffic. Posts about indie publishing? I’ve done some of those. They get decent traffic.
But are the people reading those posts looking for new science fiction novels or short stories?
Maybe a few, but mostly not. Most of those people are looking for the magic bullet–the post that tells them how to make a million bucks with their YA S&M vampire-with-cancer romance. They don’t find that on this blog.
How do I know?
Because almost no one clicks on my links to Amazon or visits the pages on this website dedicated to my actual books.
What does get traffic? My post on creating an active table of contents for Kindle files. I’m actually quite pleased that this post gets so much traffic, as it’s been able to help a lot of people get their books ready for publication. There’s not a lot of easily followable advice on the Kindle help pages, so I’m glad my post fills a niche for some people.
Other popular posts include the one on the children’s book Captain Kitty. I think it’s a lot of Captain Kitty fans who find the page. There, too, it’s nice to connect with them.
But as nice as it is to help people find what they need, these things aren’t exactly helping the blog or website fulfill its purpose of getting my books in front of readers or potential readers. How do I know? Because almost no one clicks the links to the books–and I don’t just mean the links to Amazon; people also don’t click the links to the books’ individual pages. They also don’t click the link to the free short stories.
Conclusion?
Simple enough: neither the blog nor the website itself does much to bring in viewers/readers interested in my books. People are visiting to get information or possibly to be entertained, but for the most part it’s not because they’ve heard of my books and are looking for them, nor is it because they’ve read one of my books and want to find out about others or about me.
So what do I do in light of this conclusion? Shut down the blog? Re-vamp it? I don’t know. Part of me wants to break with conventional wisdom (which says the blog should be about one thing–in this case, my writing) since that’s not really serving much purpose; instead, I could expand the blog to write about whatever’s on my mind on a give day: surf music, teaching, parenting, genealogy, science fiction, guitars, pulp fiction, book collecting. Heck, I could even blog about blogging, as I’m doing now.
Like I said, I don’t know quite what I should do. I’ll mull it over.
As of this writing, there are 333 people following this blog. Most of them signed up after one of my posts was Freshly Pressed on WordPress. That was in April of 2013, and most of those people have stuck around, which I’m grateful for. They get an email every time I hit “Publish.” But do they read the posts? I don’t know. Do they buy my books? Maybe some do. I don’t hear from them. That’s okay. They can lurk. I’ll have to see what happens to that number of followers if I radically change the content of this blog.
For now, I haven’t made up my mind. I’d be happy to consider some input.
4 Responses
I’m probably one of the few readers who finds books primarily from blogs. I am more likely to buy books from writers who maintain an active blog than writers who don’t. It’s hard to know the quality of some indie books, and a well-written blog can be an important indicator. That said, I don’t think most writers sell that many books through their blogs. I don’t think a blog is worth it unless it’s something you enjoy doing. I hope you’ll keep it up, though. I enjoy reading your blog.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You’re about the only consistent commenter I’ve got, and I appreciate it. I think you’re right about fiction writers’ blogs not being sources of sales, and I do plan on continuing–just not sure if I need to change the focus or not.
I actually read the blog to find out about your books, so I hope you keep it going. Now if you want to talk about guitars and surf music also that would make it even better!
Thanks. I appreciate it. I’ll keep up on the blog–just need to think about ways to make it more productive. Maybe that’ll be surf music. Maybe not. Take care.
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