Wordcraft – Blogging: easy as a message in a bottle

Recently a friend asked me, as friends do from time to time, how to go about writing a blog. The best thing I can tell them is that blogging is like sending messages in a bottle. Don’t send one and stop, waiting for the ship to find you. Don’t send one, hoping you’ll get rich and famous overnight. Keep the messages coming.

I only started writing a blog because the instructor of a writing class I went to told us that all writers must participate in social media. She refused to consider the excuses -- that writers are the most introverted and socially awkward of so-called professionals, a claim backed by extensive research (which I’m making up as I go along) indicating that as a group, we rank lower in interpersonal skills than sociopathic basement-dwelling computer hackers. I started with Facebook; went on to build my own website, now mercifully demolished, from a box. Then I tried blogging.

There are lots of websites that support blogging, but why not start with a free site like this one at Blogger or Wordpress, which may be more popular with writers, at least writers I follow.

It was so easy, no worse than setting up a Facebook account. Of course, I was doing everything completely and totally wrong. I learned this the first time I typed in my own URL and Google told me it couldn’t find it.

Fortunately, a few months later the DFW Writers’Conference  included a class on blogging, taught by Kristen Lamb, a tiny blonde, martial-arts chopping dynamo out to prove to writers that we can overcome the weaknesses of our blogs. Which she knew because she had been there. 

In general, it’s safest to let Kristen speak for herself through her blog, which she will, even if I could manage to slap zip ties on her wrists and gag her with duct tape, because that’s the kind of woman she is. But I’ll mention her first rule: forget the natural writerly tendency to try to fade into the background, hiding behind some blog title that’s supposed to sound cute but actually is just stupid, like mine, which has required years of therapy and massive doses of mind-altering drugs to overcome. Kristen admitted, like a motivational speaker at a 12-step program, that she had done this herself, but had overcome by relentlessly rebranding her blog as (gasp!) Kristen Lamb’s Blog. Google it. It works.

Kristen’s second rule of blogging is to rip any thought of ourselves as “aspiring writers” right out of our frontal cortexes. Ouch! (But don’t you feel better now?) “Aspiring” is for sissies. We’re writers. So we write, and we feed our blogs by writing. Often. Writing regularly and often in itself puts little bread crumb trails on the Internet that lets search engines like Google’s find us. In the meantime, we should link, link, link like crazy to our blog’s URL. Google’s bloodhounds are out there sniffing.

Somewhere along the line I heard that the simple act of writing regularly helps us write better. It’s true, although it helps if we write intentionally and with no more than moderate amounts of the above-mentioned mind-altering drugs.

We also need a theme for our posts, indeed, for our entire blog, maybe for our entire lives. (Theme being something I learned even more about from another amazing DFW Conference speaker this year, Disney Jr. channel’s photo mom, Me Ra Koh.)

I can’t remember whether Kristen ordered us to include images with our blog posts or whether I learned that on my own, but do it. Any image, even the craziest, immediately draws more attention from web surfers. Internet guru James Gaskin, who I met at another writers’ group confessed that he got a cat just so he could post cute cat pictures with his blog.

Like James, I take most of my own pictures or download them free from sites such as Wikimedia . There are sources of clip art pictures, some of which you have to pay for. Remember to play right with copyright rules or you may find FBI agents knocking on your door. And they’re way less good looking in person than in the movies.

Wordcraft – How to tame the social media circus

Last week, Wordcraft reported on the social media strategies of Me Ra Koh, “photo mom” host of Disney Jr.’s “Capture Your Story”, as well as author of bestselling how-to books on photography of kids and family. Strenuous feats of blogging helped build her artistic career. Then came the Facebook monster, stealing her blog followers, or so she thought, before she built a new following on Facebook with posts that have reached hundreds of thousands of viewers.

So what does she have to say to authors about taming the circus of Facebook and other social media outlets?

The number one secret, as mentioned last Tuesday, is for authors (and other artists) to “know what you’re about beyond the book you’re working on. This is critical. I see people post things on social media, but there’s no heart.” Just as characters in a novel need a theme, authors need to recognize the theme of their own lives.

Instead of blogging five times as week as she did previously, she told her audience at the recent DFW Writers Conference, she now blogs only once or twice a week. The majority of her social media time is spent on Facebook. To work around the 5,000 followers limit set by Facebook for a personal page, she set up a professional Facebook page. This is as easy to do as a personal page. From the multitude of do-it-yourself options I found on Google, I liked the brief tutorial at Standout Books.

Ultimately, “It’s not how many people are following (you) as it’s how many people are being reached. The biggest mistake I was making was, I was only posting about myself. If Facebook sees that you never share anyone else’s content, they will never let more people see yours. I started posting four times a day, (finding) content I could share that was related to my theme.”

Posting four times daily? The secret is to schedule, Again, there’s plenty of advice out there about how to schedule posts, including DIY tips I found at the blog Constant Contact.

“I schedule a whole week’s work of posts in four hours during my least creative time of the day,” Koh said.

She also had advice about another demon of authors – Amazon – and how to attract readers who want to know about the writer as well as her book.

Of course, if you have a book, you’ll have an Amazon author page, right? Koh’s next must-dos include an author photo. Well, she is a photographer. But I’ve been surprised when visiting the Amazon pages of authors I admire to find several of them totally without photos. It’s not about being supermodel gorgeous; it’s about letting readers know what kind of person you are. Ditto for author biographies. And then, Koh said, you must have videos, “if only to have someone holding a smart phone in front of you and letting you talk.” In fact, Koh, whose mantra is “be the reckless beginner,” believes a homemade looking video imparts more credibility than a professional one.

Finally, we’re sitting there on Amazon with our book, but no reviews. Before her books were released, Koh said, “I told people on my blog and at every email address I had that I’m going to give away autographed books to the first 40 people who write reviews for me. Send me a screen capture of your review and who you want it personalized to. When a book already has 40 reviewers, people want to review it more. If you only have a handful of reviews, it’s hard to get more.”

Wordcraft – The photo mom’s take: social media for writers

I thought I liked to take pictures, but for Me Ra Koh, the “photo mom” host of “Capture Your Story” at Disney Junior, photography was her salvation. And the bouncy real life mom, wildly waving hair only slightly restrained with a glittering headband, was onstage at this year’s DFW Writers Convention to spread the gospel of community through photos.

She knew she was born to be an artist, but her first book took 10 years, a recovery memoir, took 10 years to write, finally being birthed the same year as her daughter. Unfortunately, the joy of book launch and beautiful baby girl was soon overshadowed by the loss in pregnancy of a second beloved baby. And during the year of grief that followed, “I quit writing,” she said.

The loss, however, convinced her of the importance of capturing every moment with the child she still had. “I went to Costco and bought my first camera.” Her husband caught her love of photography, the couple started a business photographing weddings, she found photography reinspiring her inner writer. “Photography parallels writing and storytelling.”

With the advent of social media, she started blogging about photography, posting five times weekly. It took seven years of this grueling schedule, but she accumulated a following of 50,000 unique readers.

Then she received “this random email from Random House,” asking if she’d be interested in writing a book on the subject. The result, Your Baby in Pictures, became the first of a trilogy of photo how-to books, which led to guest blogging stints at Disney and travel site Condé Nast and then “why don’t we pitch about traveling?" It was an inspiration that eventually had her family circumnavigating the globe.

Then came Facebook. She hated it. “Facebook was stealing my blogging audience! I was so annoyed.” But she came to embrace it, relieved at how much Facebook eased the pressure of her previous blogging schedule. “Blogging should not be our career. Our career is writing books.”

Her not-so-secret secret of success with social media: “know what you’re about, beyond the book you’re working on. Just like your characters need a theme in your book, what is your theme? If you only get on social media to talk about your book, you will get sick of talking about your book. But knowing what your theme is: now you’ll know what to blog or post about.”

Not sure of your theme? She passed out lists of possibilities – themes for literature and life – including “compassion as heroic,” “the struggle for self-definition,” “there are no random acts in life,” and a popular one among her audience of writers, “the power of storytelling.”

“I’m amazed at how many people want to know what kind of person I am before they buy my book.”

Her suggestions for personalizing themes include "sharing bits about a personal story” (although she emphasizes only doing this once the writer has worked through an issue for herself), “extras – all the things that don’t make it into the book,” who and what inspires the writers, “anything I can teach – can I include a photo tip?”, and our personal creative process. And of course, always include a photo.

(Next Tuesday, Me Ra Koh’s tips for taming the social media circus)