Why Be Busy #Blogging?

Why Be Busy #Blogging?

Good Morning…

The title might suggest that I’m off making one of my guest post visits to the blogs of other authors. I have been doing that recently and I expect to be at a number of other blogs soon since I’ve been invited to write there about different aspects of my humorous contemporary mystery Take Me Now, which was launched in June 2015.   

Why do I take the time and trouble to write these articles which tend to average around 700 words- some being longer and some shorter? My answer’s not so simple. If you blog about your writing, I wonder what your answer would be.

There are hugely diverse and different opinions about guest blogging when it’s attempting to showcase an author’s work. From the point at which I started blogging in the summer of 2012 (reading & commenting on other blogs and writing my own), I’ve seen a change in attitude. It was hugely recommended back then—yes, only 3 years ago— to ‘get out there into cyber sphere as much as possible’ and show what you can do to ‘as many people as possible’ in the form of blog post writing. The flip side of the coin to being a guest on a blog that’s not your own is that tracking down responses, and commenting on them, used to be a massive time-suck in the writing day. That was when people were writing comments on a piece of promotional writing.

Now, I rarely see any comments that require a response on my blog, or one at which I’m guesting at. If the stats bloggers quote are true, it’s not so much that people aren’t reading the blog post; it’s more that they’re just not acknowledging it. Clicking ‘like’ and commenting takes more time than they’re willing to give. I, personally, still feel it’s polite to acknowledge a host by leaving a short ‘thank you’ if I’m guest visiting someone. I’d thank someone in real life for allowing me to step into their home and I don’t see popping into a blog as being any different. However, that courtesy doesn’t seem to be the view of many guests that I host.

So Why Be Busy #Blogging? Alternatively, another question might be Why not Stop #Blogging?

A shift of opinion since 2012 has many authors now saying that blogging isn’t worth it and that any available time should be spent on the actual new writing process. I can’t disagree with that but traffic to a blog drops significantly when there’s no blogging happening. For family reasons, I’ve had to limit my blogging during the last year and the traffic to my blog dropped significantly. A regular daily count of some 450 clicks dropped to less than a hundred on many days—the exceptions being when I actually had posted, or on days when a popular author was featured.

Does lower blog traffic mean fewer people are buying my books? Unfortunately, I don’t think that can be said at all because I don’t think there ever were any sales gained from me posting on my blog. I believe it does work for some authors that way, but clearly not for me since I can’t maintain a pushy chatty sales hype. Sales of my e-books are minimal—I’m much more successful at selling paperback books at my Craft Fair venues, so again I have to say Why Be Busy #Blogging if it doesn’t produce any sales?

I’d love my ebook sales to rocket, and more reviews would help with the selling process on Amazon, but my reasons for blogging are more to do with the socialising/social media aspects which I normally find difficult.

I’m also still at the point where I like to meet new authors so I’ll be continuing to showcase their work on my blog. It takes me around 10 minutes to set up a simple promotional guest post and I don’t consider that too much of my day gone. I’ve a lot of guests booked for the coming weeks since Crooked Cat Publishing have a lot of fantastic new authors, so I’ll get to know and share a bit about them and their work.

I DO have to find alternative ways of selling e-books via the internet because I'd love more people to enjoy my books…but that’ll be in another post.

The Crooked Cat Summer Sale continues for one more day (ends 15th August), so if you feel inclined to check out my books you'll find them HERE.

Slainthe!