Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Random Writing Tips – blog mining

 

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. 

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Image from Pixabay.


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