It
seems that if you want to sell your books – especially if you self-publish –
you need to find and engage with an audience.
That’s great an all, if you’re someone who can hold a conversation. One time in college, I was walking somewhere
with a woman and she said, “So, tell me about yourself.” I thought for a bit
and replied, “I was born.” She laughed, and then started talking about
something else. I’m not an engager. (Not to brag, but years later a different
woman said that, while I was smart and funny, talking with me was “mentally and
emotionally draining.”) Ideally, I’d
publish a book and then just have it be magically found. But we don’t live in a world of magic –
dammit – so if I want to find an audience, I need to do something.
One
of the things I’m trying is publishing more blogs – with titles like Random
Writing Tips – in the hope that someone might stumble upon this and be funneled
to my books. Of course, over the years
I’ve written numerous blogs. While many
of them are comments on – at the time – current events, some of them are still
relevant and I recently went back through my blogs and found all these
posts. Some deal with things I can
expand on, but others I can use as is.
For example, over the years I’ve posted short stories or poems dealing
with some holiday, like Halloween. So
now every October I can just tweet out a link to this story for the
season.
And
that’s the basic idea of blog mining.
You’ve spent hours and hours writing blogs that – in all likelihood –
get swallowed up in the internet quicksand in less than a day. Why let all the work go to waste when all it
takes is a tweet to bring it back to the surface.
***
Image
from Pixabay.
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