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Once upon a time, writers wrote a book, then launched a blog to help promote it. I did that. And now, for my next act, I’m thinking about going in the opposite direction. Why? Because in the new world publishing order, where "platform" is key to an author’s success, writers are learning the importance of engaging readers well before their book is born. Yet authors, both emerging and established, are left with justifiable questions about the order of things.
Here are just a few:
1. Logistics -— Do I start the blog before I land the book contract, or after?
2. Creative process —- Do I use the blog as a sounding board through which to develop the book idea, or do I think through the book and then turn to the blog?
3. Redundancy and originality —- How do I leverage the blog to generate interest in the book, rather than “give” it all away before the book comes out? How much material from the blog will my publisher allow me to use in the book, and how does that affect what content goes into the book and what goes on the blog?
There are as many answers to these questions as there are blogs. Well, perhaps not quite as many. But to show you what I mean, let me break this down.
1. Logistics
In speaking to She Writers who have succeeded, exponentially, in moving from blog to book, I’ve learned that there are some (like Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project book and blog) who started with the book contract then built the blog. Others, like Pamela Redmond Satran, author of the book How Not to Act Old and a blog of the same name, started the blog because she couldn't sell the idea as a magazine article and was eager to learn about blogging nevertheless. Both Gretchen and Pamela’s books were New York Times bestsellers. Egg, chicken. Chicken, egg.
2. Creative Process
This one’s still more complicated. Some of us like to think in public, in the messy, free-associative, hyperlinked way that blogs allow. Writers who begin as bloggers are conditioned to create in this way. But for others, including those seasoned writers among us who entered the craft long before the web hatched, creativity takes place in private, in the “shed,” to borrow a term from jazz. As journalist Sarah Glazer recently wrote in a column titled “Writing as Solitude,” not everything we write should go instantly to readers. Sarah quotes New Republic art critic Jed Perl, who says, “Writing, before it is anything else, is a way of clarifying one’s thoughts. For many of us who love the act of writing ... there is something monastic about the process, a confrontation with one’s thoughts that has a value apart from the proximity or even perhaps the desirability of any other readers.” She goes on to question “whether the very personal Internet blog, by breaking down the traditional privacy of the diary, can actually make for worse writing -— when there’s no time for reflection or for the critical eye of an editor. A kind of garrulousness descending into logorrhea.” Sarah Glazer is not alone. ‘Nuf said.
3. Originality
Here is where publishers, methinks, are short-sighted -- and confusing us all. As Pamela suggested in a recent She Writes Radio interview with our own Kamy Wicoff (fast fwd to 6:30 if you listen), publishers, understandably baffled by a rapidly changing landscape, are hoarding and acting a bit like government subsidies that pay farmers not to farm. Over the past decade, traditional book publishers, who face stiff competition from online content -— including, at times, online versions of their own -— have learned to cover their bases. Book contracts these days often presuppose the publisher’s right to digital content, as well as rights in any medium that is known now or might be developed in the future and known to God or man. That leaves little room
