Birthday Candle by Ardfern via Wikimedia Commons
This week marks an entire year of blogging – October 23rd will be my one-year blog anniversary! Happy Blog Birthday to Novel Conclusions! In honor of this epically momentous occasion, I’ve decided to put together this gorgeous list of what I’ve learned about blogging.
- I’m not alone. There’s this whole community of writers and book bloggers and fan girls and people who just adore the English language. Becoming a part of this super fun community encourages me to do more inside the writing arena (like participating in NaNoWriMo). The book and writing community rocks!
- Bonus: Interacting with said community drives engagement on your blog. Who woulda thought? Catching up on what other writers and book enthusiasts are doing encourages people to drop by your blog and join the conversation.
- Positive posts/notes/comments get the most love. There was actually a report done about Facebook recently backing up this idea. Outside of reports and etc., people in the blogosphere tend to be much friendlier than, say, commenters on a newspaper website or a gossip column – another reason the book and writing blogosphere is amazing.
- It’s okay to occasionally break the cycle of your blog posts. Your audience won’t immediately disappear. I usually try to post about once a week. Occasionally it will be more often, and sometimes when life is crazy, less often. However, don’t wait too long between blog posts. Two weeks is a little vacation. Two months is more like starting over.
- There’s a wealth of knowledge in the blogosphere about everything imaginable that’s related to books and writing. Reading all the posts over at Nathan Bransford’s blog and Mary Kole’s blog would practically give you an MFA. That’s not even mentioning other fantastic resources like Lynn Price at the Behler Blog or all the other agents and editors and authors with free, abundant, awesome writing and publishing tips. You can even interact with these people by commenting. Craziness.
What have you all learned while blogging? What have you done to streamline your blog? What do you like (or dislike) that others do with their blogs?
P.S. I also took this opportunity to discover that this blog’s sun sign is Libra, which apparently represents the element of air or intellect. We can pretend that I planned that. ;-)
P.P.S. This shows a way cool map of indie bookstores in your area (and also confirmed my knowledge that LA is severely lacking in indie bookstores).
