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154 The Blog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sounds like the title of a horror movie, doesn’t it? But what would its tag-​ line be? How about “Creating it was easy; killing it was another story”? Your publisher may want you to start a blog, and any number of books about getting published may encourage you to start a blog. I may be in the minority here, but I’m going to suggest that you don’t start a blog . . . unless it absolutely makes sense for you to have one, or unless you can bring something so fresh and compelling to the reader that it would be silly not to. Can we all agree that the Internet is a time-​ suck? Even though we all admit this, no one will turn it off. One way that it becomes a massive time-​ suck is when you start blogging. I know; I’ve been there. Did I have readers? Yes.Was it fun? For a while. Did my blogging yield book sales? Maybe a few. Was the increase in book sales worth the time spent blogging? Absolutely not. Obviously, there are bloggers who’ve gotten book deals because their blogs generated tremendous traffic, but these folks are lottery winners, essentially. A blog by a former student of mine, Matt Gallagher , a former lieutenant in the Iraq War, ultimately grew into his memoir, Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War, published by Da Capo Press. Gallagher’s blog was receiving tens of thousands of views and became national news when the Army ordered it shut down. There are far more bloggers, however, with a modest number of readers who can’t seem to finish writing their books or get a book contract. The time and energy that goes into maintaining a blog rarely seems worth it to me. Instead of writing a two-​ page blog entry, write two pages on your novel. Or, spend that time revising what you’ve written. Or, read a book. Imagine how much better your odds of getting published would be if all writers, aspiring or otherwise , spent their spare time buying and reading new books rather than reading and writing blogs. Another danger is that you might turn off your readers with your tone. There are fiction writers whose novels I enjoy, but when I read their blogs, I discover, for one reason or another, that I’m not crazy about the writer as a person. This isn’t always true, of course, but it’s Publicity 155 true far more times than I would have guessed. Perhaps the writer’s blog was pretentious or self-​ congratulatory or full of false modesty or contentious, or maybe the tone was off-​ putting in some other way that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It’s hard, then, to go back to those authors’ books with the same sense of anticipation, if you can go back to them at all. You might eventually piss off someone of influencewith your blog. I’m certainly not a person of much influence, but I’ve been insulted, both overtly and inadvertently, on blogs written by writers I had previously supported. No one is immune to doing this. The longer you maintain a blog, the better your odds are of rubbing someone the wrong way. One of the reasons I eventually quit blogging about writing was because I made the mistake of writing an ironic blog about an episode concerning science-​ fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin. She had been one of my childhood heroes. When my second book was released , I wrote a letter to her and sent her a copy of my book. I signed it, sentimentally, “For Ursula K. Le Guin, Whose own books inspired me to become a writer.With gratitude, John McNally.” Le Guin, in turn, wrote a very nice letter to me. A few years later, I discovered that the book was for sale on a used book site. A bookstore in Portland, Oregon—Le Guin’s hometown—was selling it. Where another person might have been offended, I actually thought it was hilarious— enough so to blog about it. (I was always short of things to blog about, and this seemed tailor-​ made for my blog.) Laying the irony on thick, I feigned outrage that Le Guin had sold my book. How dare she! I also pretended that my feelings were deeply hurt. The insincerity of my tone, I had thought, would have been obvious to...

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