I promised to say something about this new-to-me experience of blogging. Well, as someone who is a card-carrying female Canadian baby boomer, I can tell you: the blogosphere is not my world. In fact, according to Technorati’s 2009 report “State of the Blogosphere,” most bloggers are between the ages of 18-44, American, and male.
I do have a website – who doesn’t these days? – but I certainly don’t Twitter, although my blogger friends tell me I might consider doing that, since that’s one way for people to find my blog.
I do have a Facebook account, but I hardly ever use it. I set it up years ago when my kids were in their early teens so I could stealth them. They of course forgot they had made me their “friend” because I never posted anything on their walls; I snooped silently on their postings and when concerned, had to be very creative about how I approached them with what I’d learned on FB.
I am, after all, a member of the generation that started all this technology stuff. So it wasn’t a huge stretch to come up with the idea of writing this blog. I was chatting with my son, “Corporate Guy” (a recent Business Marketing grad) about how businesses have really started to expand into social networking. A website is no longer sufficient – businesses worldwide are now using all manner of blogs, tweets and walls to reach their increasingly Internet-dependent customers. Those “Generation Ys” are now getting jobs and buying stuff! And so I thought, hey, I could write a blog about writing my book!
Are Gen Y’s interested in blogs about historical adventure books? Would they at least tell their Boomer parents about the blog so they can subscribe? I guess we’ll find out!
Muskoka Books and I plan to link the blog to several Muskoka area and history-based sites, helping it to do what it needs to do. Which is: bring people to the site so they can watch a writer in the act of getting from idea to published book.
Yikes. Sounds suspiciously like the stealthing I used to do on Facebook.
I do find that reading a blog is like eavesdropping. It’s kind of like finding someone’s diary. Maybe that’s what makes them so irresistible!
Do you see your blog as only a supplement or sideline to your book? Or do you think your blog writing has value on its own? Do you see a second book of blog posts in your future?
This blog has already proven itself to be of great value to me, in terms of keeping on track with the progress of the book. I have committed, after all, to “report in” once a week, so I have to have something to say! Also, you’ll see in the next post (which I’ve already drafted) that I’ve been struggling with keeping my research focussed. It was through writing that post that I realized I was in danger of losing focus and made some adjustments to my plan!
What does the future hold for me and blogging? I’m not sure. The challenges I’ve been dealing with so far are: keeping it honest and trying to master the 300 word essay! More on that soon… 🙂