Do Fiction Writers Need to Blog?

This is a part of a series on blogging for writers. See also (or coming soon, if no link yet):

What to blog about – for writers
How Long Is a Blog Post?
I Don’t Want to Blog, so, now what?
Why Blog on Medium?
Give Credit Where it’s Due (Photo sourcing and crediting)

The short answer is yes. Fiction writers need to blog (unless they reach their audience another way – podcasts, TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, other publications and then even then, yes.)

Blogging is your voice. Your connection to your audience. It is a way to reach someone who will like you, as a writer, for free. It is free to them, and largely free to you. (You may pay a hosting price for a domain name. You may choose to blog on Medium – which may charge your readers a nominal price.)

Do you remember when you used to go to an ice cream shop when you were little? How excited were you when they let you have a free sample on a little pink spoon?

Your Blog is Your Pink Spoon.

It’s free. It’s a sample. It’s fun and exciting. It’s exactly how you entice your readers to try new flavors of writers.

You Want Your Book to Find its Audience

Believe me when I say, it is painful when your book comes out, and DOESN’T find its audience. You’ve taken months, even years to write it. How are you going to feel when an agent, a publisher and a publicist give it about 6 weeks’ effort, and then on to the next, whether or not your book found its readers??

It is heartbreaking.

It’s your job to attract your readers – even if you have an agent, and a publisher.

The quality of your writing and storytelling may get you in the door and published, but you literally have 6 – 8 weeks on shelf to get noticed, appreciated and recommended. That’s how long the buzz – however strong it’s going to be – lasts. 6-8 weeks.

Now, my first book didn’t earn out of its advance – which is to say, I didn’t sell enough books to begin getting additional royalties paid to me. I was sort of mortified. Not only did I feel like a failure, but I was bereft that the book I’d cradled and nursed was out the window with the bathwater.

Later, I learned that the publisher didn’t much mind that I didn’t earn out of my advance. It’s par for the course, apparently. And they just expected me to write another book. (I do wish someone had told me that, at the time.)

Since writing a book is a big eff’ing job, however, I wanted that one to sell. Too late.

You’re writing a book you love. Go the distance and make a clear path for this book into the world, into the hands of readers who want it. Blogging is an inexpensive way to do that. And once you get over the resistance, and feeling sorry for yourself, it can be fun.

It’s as fun as you make it.

Non-fiction writers blog about their topic of expertise, and a platform is essential to selling a book to a publisher. If you’re self-publishing, you can shortcut the expectations of 10,000 person mailing lists and regular speaking or a popular podcast and blog, but you have an even greater burden of selling your own book – so why wouldn’t you??

Fiction writers don’t actually have to have the dreaded platform for their work to be picked up by an agent and sold to a publisher. The writing and story can pave the way. And this is what we all dream of – the overnight sensation. We all hope that we have written that bestseller that has already been turned down by 42 publishers but becomes a cultural sensation, once it’s released.

And it could happen. It does happen. But usually, it happens to people who already have a following of people who like their writing.

Share your point of view. Your blog is a reflection of you, and offers value, insight, fun, escape, fantasy – whatever you value – to your readers. You should write about whatever you like to write about. Cultivate your following. Talk with them as you would friends. Write about whatever you like:

Travel, poetry, stories from your life.

A daily comic, photograph with caption, drawing.

Historical stories from an era you write from or about.

Your pov on something unassociated with your fiction – music, for instance, or a trend you notice on social media.

You can also regularly “point to” things you’ve come across that you enjoy. In essence, you’re “retweeting” in your blog. You’re linking to stories that ticked you off, or delighted or befuddled you.

Be consistent

No one likes this one. We’re creative, and we prefer to keep our time loosey-goosey. But do you want your book sales and impact on the world to be loosey-goosey? No, we want guarantees. (There are none.) But if you blog, pick a day (or days) of the week or month that you officially blog, and release a blog on that date. This doesn’t have to hang over your head like the sword of Damocles. You can batch write blog posts when you’re inspired, and drip feed them on the consistent schedule you’ve chosen in advance.

We’re talking about blogging and more in the Write Without the Fight FB Group – Come ask to join, if you haven’t already. Also, going on in FB group, and on Zoom, the Write Without the Fight 5-Day challenge starts soon. Sign up here.