I once heard John Updike say in an interview that he could not imagine a day going by in which he did not produce “text.” The word jumps out of the sentence — “text,” so like the “content” the web feeds on. Updike was frighteningly prolific. Like the great Victorians, he seemed to pour out words: thirty novels, plus countless poems, essays, reviews and, best of all, short stories. Had he been born later, he would have been a natural blogger. He would never have been so enthralled by the magic of seeing his words printed on dead trees.
I’m no Updike. I can easily imagine a day in which I produce no text. Happens all the time. The enemy of the possible is the perfect, and, alas, often the enemy of writing is perfectionism. Managing my perfectionism is probably my biggest struggle as a writer. But blogging demands constant output — content. So how will blogging affect my day job, writing novels?
I have always avoided writing for the web because I was afraid it would suck away some of the creative energy I need for my novels. Novel-writing is grueling. It demands long periods of quiet and concentration. The web, an endless stream of flashing, hyperlinked calls for your attention, is lethal to that sort of sustained focus. It is a stimulation machine. The novelist Neal Stephenson shut himself off from the web entirely because, he said (via), “I simply cannot respond to all incoming stimuli unless I retire from writing novels. And I don’t wish to retire at this time.” I have always felt the same way.
But, after The Crash in publishing, midlist (or downlist) writers like me simply cannot afford to ignore the web. Toxic as it is to book-writing, the web is essential to book-selling.
And we writers simply have to become better marketers. We cannot just leave it to publishers to sell our books anymore. They don’t know how. I recently asked my agent, What would be a realistic sales goal for my upcoming third novel? Fifty thousand copies? “The question is naive,” she answered, “because nobody has any way of knowing how many it will sell.” In no other business would it be naive to think about how many widgets you might actually sell when you try to figure out whether it is profitable to produce them. But that is the industry wisdom. So we writers have to turn to the web as a way to circumvent the publisher-bookstore complex and market directly to our readers — that is, if we can find our readers.
Or maybe it is better to say, if our readers can find us in the vast, raucous environment of the internet. It is a long, hard job to make yourself visible on the web, to find your audience. The bloggers who do it best, like two of my favorites, Andrew Sullivan and Sarah Weinman, have been at it a very long time.
But we novelists can do it, too, I hope. As business writers like Seth Godin have proved, authors can learn to pitch their own books cheaply and effectively. What choice do we have? A lucky few will be buoyed up to the surface by huge marketing campaigns by their publishers. Most won’t. We writers are all independent booksellers now. So increasingly, sometimes reluctantly, we establish ourselves on the web with blogs like this one.
I do not mean to turn this into a blog about blogging, but I suspect I will have more to say on the subject in the future. For now, suffice it to say that blogging and novel-writing are uneasy partners. I’ll post here as often as I can without it interfering with writing my novels. Like Neal Stephenson, I don’t wish to retire as a novelist at this time.
Setting my fears aside for a moment, I wonder if blogging will actually help my novel-writing by teaching me to write fast, without self-editing. It may just loosen my fingers. Imagine, loose fingers! You keep yours crossed for me. I’ll use mine for typing.
Good luck finding your balance. I don’t think it has to be quite so difficult to balance the two as one would imagine, but it does require self-discipline.
As to figuring out how much a book will sell, that’s a tough thing to figure. Unlike widgets, where you can calculate how many thingamabobs are already out there that will need replacement widgets or the like, books don’t have anywhere near as firm a base to figure sales on. I looked at opening a bookstore a couple of years ago and really got bogged down trying to figure out anything about possible sales. That’s a little different that predicting the sales of the “next book by author X” though.
Bill –
Great to see you grabbing hold of your own marketing.
As for blogging versus writing, if you are going to be distracted form writing, the distraction might as well be other writing.
Not sure how palatable this is to all the writers out there, but I suspect that these days a writer has to think of him/herself as an entrepreneur. In which case, you need to not only create your product (a book) but market it (with, for instance, a blog). One of the big aha’s of having my own consulting business is that doing things like running the business and marketing the business IS part of my job now…not like before when someone else in the company did that and I could just focus on client work. I AM the company now, with all that entails.
Michele, I think you have it exactly right. Like it or not, writers do have to be entrepreneurs now. What makes it especially difficult for us writers, though, is that there is no direct contact with the customer (because books are consumed in private) and during the long stretches between books the writer really has no product to market anyway, except his back list which sells very slowly in the absence of a new book. That and the fact that, after spending months alone with our thoughts and our made-up characters, we novelists often are not the most extroverted people anyway! Thanks for chiming in.