Bloggle

I’ve two new blogs to add to the short list of links I keep over — thataway. [Imagine a disembodied hand waving toward the rightmost column of the page you’re looking at. Thank-you.]

The first of these — Daniel’s Coffee Blog — by Daniel Humphries, another Seattle-born coffee guy, who for some reason chose NYC over Vermont when he got restless leg syndrome (the old-fashioned kind… not the “malady” they try to sell you drugs for on the nightly news). On occasion I’d drop by Daniel’s LiveJournal pages to find amazing things like this photo collection from a trip to Ethiopia. Here’s hoping he finds lots of inspiration with his new digs.

The second is another blog on writing — Ecstatic Days — by fantasy author Jeff Vandermeer. I have at least one of Jeff’s books in my reading pile [Shriek, if you must know] and, while I haven’t yet opportunity to get beyond the first few pages, I expect good things. All the more so after following a link to this post — Evil Monkey’s Guide to Kosher Imaginary Animals — by way of Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s Making Light.

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James Alan Gardner at SF Novelists offers a nifty list of boneheaded things writers do that force him to just put the book down and walk away. I find I have a lot in common with his point of view:

… a boring book doesn’t make me mad; my interest just dwindles until I never pick up the book again. On the other hand, there are some books I’ve been reading along with pleasure, when suddenly, sometimes at an exact word, I stop and say, “No farther.” I’m not the sort of person who hurls books across the room, but I’m definitely the sort to remember and hold a grudge. How can a story that’s going along well plunge so abruptly down the tubes?

I’ve only ever once actually hurled a book across the room. That one occasion was the result of one of the items on James’ list:

A diabolus ex machina is the same as a deus ex machina but with a devil instead of a god. I use it for those times that an author artificially pours crap on some character’s head, just to make a situation more dire.

I accept that characters always have to face obstacles; characters usually have to suffer; characters sometimes go through gut-wrenching ordeals. But I hate it when the pain happens arbitrarily. Nothing turns me off faster than the author trying to squeeze out more pathos by piling up flukes of bad luck.

In my case, the book I was reading (and I admit this somewhat sheepishly) was The Witching Hour by Anne Rice, and the author had just heaped one too many troubles upon the head of the very likable and empathetic character, Michael Curry. I’d like to know what happened to him some day (or maybe not… he was clearly being set up for still more troubles down the road.) But so far as I’m concerned, Rice broke the boundaries of our reading relationship that day and — while I’m really not the sort to hold a grudge — I haven’t read a word of her work since.

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This week I gathered some of the conflated and oft conflicting advice for would-be bloggers in my inaptly titled post, Ur Doin’ It Wrong!. To my surprise and delight, Teresa Nielsen Hayden dropped by to dispense some good advice. To wit:

As far as I can tell, the weblog rules that matter are:

1. Have good content. If you’re good when you stick to a specialized subject, then write about that. If you’re good at a broader range of subjects, that’s fine too.

2. Update frequently. Monday morning is the most important time to have a new entry up.

3. Don’t publish lackluster articles just to have something new. Frequent posting makes people who are already reading you more likely to come back, but dull, slack, hackneyed, or error-ridden articles make readers go away and not come back at all. Bad writing can do a lot of damage fast.

4. Use clear, simple, declarative titles on your articles. That’s all your RSS subscribers will see. If they can’t tell what the article is about, they’re much less likely to click through and read the whole thing.

5. Make yourself easy to find and link to. A name and an email address are good too. You don’t have to use your full legal name, but you should give people a way to get in touch with you.

6. Go ahead and optimize your site for search engines, but please understand that there’s only so much it can do. Good content is far more important.

7. Cherish your good commenters. When one of them says something smart, promote it to the front page. Everyone wins.

8. Kick out the jerks and trolls. They cost you far more traffic than they represent or bring in. While you’re at it, always clean out comment spam as soon as you spot it.

9. If you want people to link to you, link to them first, and say why you’re doing it. This is far likelier to convince the blogger you’ve linked to that you are a person of superior taste and perception. Also, never fail to credit a link you pick up from someone else.

10. Don’t blog to make money. Blog because you love it. If you keep loving it, and your readers love it too, start thinking about selling ads.

–TNH

Good advice, all of it, and I’ll be passing it along to my new school of blogging folk, even as I endeavor to follow it myself.

Have *you* got any great advice for newly hatched bloggers? By all means, join the conversation!

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It would seem that for the last eight years I’ve been going about this blogging thing all wrong. Let me ’splain.

I’m putting together a blog project for a new-sprung group of budding bloggers — folks who, for the most part have never blogged before, in many cases aren’t familiar with blogs. I thought it’d be helpful to gather some of the collected wisdom on the state-of-the-art of blogging, and in so doing found more material than I’d realized existed on blogging for fun and profit. Mostly for profit.

I’d known there were folks who make a living by way of their blogs and the resulting ad revenue. I hadn’t imagined just how *many* of those folks there are now… nor had I imagined how many exist for the singular purpose of extoling the virtues of, and methods for, making money by blogging. I guess it’s a new millennial variant on the late-night infomercials of yore: “You, too, can make money without hardly tryin’!”

A sampling of the tenor of these modern-day Guthy Renker wannabees:

• 43 Web Design Mistakes to Avoid (I guess they couldn’t manage another seven)
• 30 Traffic Generation Tips
• 28 Ways to Make Money with Your Website (sic)
• How to Write Your ‘About Me’ Page
• Double Your Website (sic, again) In 30 Days

If I were to apply the very bestest, most oft-offered advice, I should: focus on a single niche, differentiate my blog from all others, do interviews, write really good titles, offer free stuff, be opinionated and — apparently — write a dozen different blogs, each on a different subject. Oh, and post every day. Preferably many times.

Funny thing is, there’s actually some really good advice hidden in there… especially for someone who has no intent of becoming a professional blogger, or a professional huckster of blogs. And I’ll get to work on that ‘About Me’ page presently.

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