Today, while perusing Facebook, I noticed a writer apologizing for her absence on her blog. It made me laugh. How funny that a writer should be apologizing for not writing. In truth, she was writing and she was writing a lot. In her blogging absence, she was writing a book. She was completely focused on the story she was telling and getting the words onto paper before they vanished forever.
That’s How Writers Work
It’s not uncommon for a writer, seized with inspiration, to become solely focused on a project. When you’re working on a book, nothing else is on your mind. Balancing blogging and marketing your other books along with your work in progress, can be darn near impossible. It’s just too much for most romance writers to juggle. The truth is that romance writers are generally terrible bloggers. If they’re blogging a lot, you can be relatively certain they’re not working on a manuscript. However, with a little self awareness and preparation, you can overcome this small flaw.
Seize Your Inspiration
I’m assuming you have a blog dedicated to your writing career and marketing your books, if you don’t then start working on one now – build your audience before you publish. (Check out this series on creating your writer’s platform).
Assuming you have a blog, how do you make sure you’re blogging consistently?
Best advice is to seize the moment and write your brains out.
When you’re feeling inspired to blog write several posts. Write as many posts as you can and don’t publish them all at once. Spread it out. Use your blog’s scheduling functionality to schedule one or two a week. In essence, do what most writers don’t like to do and work ahead.
Here’s another little trick that you can use to keep your blog loaded with fresh content – share videos, photos, and content from other sites. For example, if you write paranormal romance you might share interesting paranormal news, videos and fun images that you find online. You don’t have to write much more than a paragraph when sharing content from other sites. However, don’t forget to source the information. If you share a photo, make sure you can share it and give the photographer or source credit for the photo.
The point of your blog isn’t to open a vein and share your deepest emotions.
It’s to keep your readers engaged and to provide entertaining or informative content. You can do that by capitalizing on days when you feel like blogging and by remembering that you can share interesting and relevant content from other sources. Ask yourself if your audience would be interested in the content and if the answer is “yes” then you’re off to a great start.
Happy writing!