Half-planned whirlwinds

I'd meant to post a new interview on Tuesday.  I have an excellent excuse.  You see, in my world, it's still Monday.  This week has a been one very long Monday, interrupted by an inconvenient series of naps.

But what a Monday!

Sunday:  get up, make bread, pack the car, chase the dog around and around and around and around, pack the bread, get in the car, drive for six hours until landing in Oshawa Ontario, park, get out, unpack the car, chat with Grampa, go for dinner with my mother, go upstairs with dog in tow, lie in bed and pretend to sleep.

End Monday part one.

Monday (the real thing):  Endure 2 hours of fidgety sleep (one before dawn, one immediately after), get up, scurry the dog through ablutions, zoom into the kitchen, set up the laptop and attempt to rush through 5 weekly reports (due Monday), 4 monthly reports (due Tuesday), 1 major 5-year study (due Friday last week), and 1 major new build (due Friday two weeks ago).

Discover that only two data points (out of 65) are functioning correctly.  Yippee!

Spend the next nine hours freaking out.

Pause freaking out long enough to discover that the church (which you left behind in Montreal) is bereft of any music sheets.  They're missing one singer (me), one person for recording the music (me), and one person for the music sheets required by all musicians and singers (that would be me).  FAN-tastic!

Jump in the car; Mother drives, I text, email and Blackberry Messenge' frantically in English, French, jibberish and minced curse words while dealing with simultaneous crises.

Arrive at Durham College and be a cheerful guest lecture in Tobin Elliott's patient and polite Creative Writing class (all the while dealing with a mild case of food poisoning from breakfast earlier in the day).  Tobin says I did all right, but I thought I rattled on pretty much the way I am right now, hardly pausing for breath and not entirely making sense, though from one word to the next I seem to be coherent except until you stop at the very end of the sentence, your eyes whirling in their sockets, as you try to grasp the enormity of the vagueness that is my mind.  Holy run-on sentence, Batman.

Exchange cars with Mother, go home, move more cars around, go to bed and pretend to sleep.

End Monday part two.

Tuesday:  endure about two predawn hours of bizarre and disturbing nightmares, get up, chase the dog through her ablutions, screech over to the kitchen table and commence one-handed typing while jamming fresh-made bread into the side of one mouth.  Muscle through 5 weekly reports (due Monday), 4 monthly reports (due immediately), 1 major 5-year study (overdue), and 1 major new build (grossly overdue).  Parry all (understandable) complaints from upper management at the lack of reporting, riposte with excuses and ETAs.  Freak out some more, just for the cardio exercise.  Compile data for an additional 52 data points, and throw together as much of the reporting as possible.

Pause freaking out long enough to jump in a Dodge Charger with Tobin (leaving the poor bewildered dog behind), zoom down major highways into the heart of Toronto, jump out, and commence hobnobbing!  Tobin and I were delighted to attend the book launch of Howard Shrier's Boston Cream!  With Linwood Barclay as MC!  I met up with other such wonderful authors as Rick Blechta, Dorothy McIntosh and Jill Edmonson.

Hang around a little while longer, networking, blabbing, and generally making a fool of myself while Tobin wittily and coolly sits back, having a grand old time.  (I, in the meantime, couldn't stop thinking about a) interviews, b) reporting, c) churches missing music sheets, d) how gauche I must sound to "real authors", and e) how wonderful it would be to have a book launch of my own.)

Return home by way of a gut-busting laugh-fest with Tobin, spend a little time with my mother and grandfather, shuttle cars around, go upstairs, lie down, and pretend to sleep.

End Monday part three.

(Deep breath...and now we carry on.)

Wednesday:  Suffer 3 predawn hours of nightmare-infested sleep (did you know the emails you get in your dreams can be darned realistic?), get up, run barking after the dog as she performs her ablutions, jump in the car, drive to Scarborough by way of drive thru breakfast, work for an hour and a half, jitter around the office building with members of my old team (and accidentally end up sitting right beside Tobin), jump back in the car, drive back to Oshawa, run around Staples trying to arrange a data transfer sometime in the next 24 hours, run back home, work for an additional ten hours (completing 4 overdue weekly reports, 3 monthly reports, no new builds and a pathetically overdue 5-year study), decline an invite to coffee with my mother and some of her friends (COFFEE?  Did you say COFFEE?!), shut down one computer, run upstairs and turn on another, and watch the dog drowse and wag her tail.

I wonder if there could ever be such a thing as a designated sleeper.

Did I mention the food poisoning, round two?

Now, I could spend another hour and a half working up one of the interviews, or I could stretch out with a decent book, probably one by Howard Shrier or Ed Kurtz, or I could play a re-run of The Incredible Hulk, Season Three, then pretend to sleep, nightmares or otherwise.

I'm going home tomorrow night.  I need to slow down, and I desperately need to sleep.

As much as I love it out here, if I'm going to do any more freaking out, I'd rather at least be where I can access data through something a little more robust than a steaming USB modem, where I can blast music by U2, ZZ Top, Artie Shaw and Caravan Palace, and where I can walk around my apartment wearing nothing but underpants and a smile.

And that, dear reader, is why you'll be getting two interviews back-to-back this week - one tomorrow, and one on Friday.  It's because I like my interviewees too much to give them a slap-dash presentation.

Seriously, though, I picked the worst (and best) possible week to be out here.  Murphy's Law was waiting here for me.  And boy, did the week flash by.  The last thing I clearly remember was climbing out of the bath tub with Tobin's book (Vanishing Hope) in hand, and going to bed on Saturday night.

Oh waiiiiit a second...that might explain the strange dreams and the lack of sleep...hm...

Meh - I can't  stay mad at him.  He drove me to Howard's event.

But a lot of good came out of this week, too.  Tobin let me speak to his class, I got to meet up with Howard Shrier and umpteen different authors - including some I'd never met before - and I managed to complete most of my reports, despite the arduous and frustrating delays.

And I really don't expect any more than 4 or 5 hours of conscious downtime between now and Tuesday next week. On top of everything else, we're starting up practices for the Easter concert at church (guess who's directing...), I sing on Sunday, I have four more interviews now lined up, and I'm trying to launch a new business.

I live in exciting times.

Is it June yet?

Heck - is it Tuesday yet?

Here's hoping some SleepyTime Tea will keep me tranquil for an hour or two.

Sweet dreams, dear reader.  You are now my designated sleeper.  At least until Tuesday.  Whenever that may be.

Marketing your Blog: It's more than "Blarfing".

As part of my "get out of my head and into someone else's" campaign for 2012, I'm following more blogs than ever, and I read more one-off posts now, too.

In order to know who's updated what and when, Blogger gives me a nice snapshot of all the blogs I'm following, even if the post is written through WordPress or a private website.  Partially because Michael Lorenson and Lee Lofland are writing their blogs daily, I'm reading daily.  So I check my reader summary daily.  Sometimes two or three times daily.  Sometimes I check it like a maniac, because data is taking forever to run, or because I can't figure out how to fill a plot hole and it's killing me.

That got me thinking about how we market our blogs.  How do we get more readers?  And why bother, if you're an unpublished author?
 
I know Facebook has a "Networked Blogs by Ninua".  Here, you can search blogs by category, twenty blogs at a time.  I'm registered there, too, under "Writing."

But under the "Writing" category, blogs are ordered by number of existing followers.  And I tried to find out how many blogs under "writing" there were.  Apparently Ninua can't count that high, but it's probably more than 5000.  (And for the love of all good things, don't put "Muse", "Musings" or any variant thereof in your frigging blog post title.  It's.Over.Done.)

And as for the count of how many are "following", that's Ninua's count, not Blogger's count.  I gave up scrolling through blogs in the "writing" category, because after almost 3000 registered blogs, I still hadn't found myself.  I'm at the very bottom of Ninua's list, because according to Ninua, I have only two followers, and I'm one of them.  Only the most already-popular posts are going to float to the top and attract new readers.

So basically, I would have greater success handing out business cards to strangers on the street than I would if I relied on Ninua's listings.  That means I can't leave anything to chance.  I have to work to get more exposure, if I want more readers.

Once a new post has gone live, ordinarily I send out a notification through Facebook and Twitter.  Facebook is still my biggest referral URL (shouldering that spambot domar.ru out of top spot), so I know that FB is a good way to notify folks of a blog post update.

Some blogs I follow now because I've been perusing author websites or being referred to certain blogs by other readers.  That's why I started following Annie Off Leash by Annie Boreson.  So, yes to old-fashioned word of mouth. But I've found the majority of my new reading material through a post recommendation on Facebook.  That's how I found Graveyard Shift. So, yes to Facebook, too.

But I also found that readership through FB has everything to do with the timing of your post, and with the popularity of your readers.  If you have a family member with few friends (and assuming they like you enough to check up on you daily), the message will get through to them easily enough. But if someone has a gazillion friends and professional contacts, your FB status update and/or link are going to get buried quickly under that reader's slushpile of status updates.

I still haven't found the timing sweet spot for FB links.  Post in the morning, when everyone's checking their FB news?  Lunchtime?  In the evening?  Post repeatedly until people de-friend you?  I dunno.

And most importantly, unless someone else re-tweets your post or shares the link on their own FB profile, your tweets and FB status updates never reach beyond your own established circle of contacts.

Or does Twitter or Facebook even matter, if people tend to use things like RSS Feeds, Google Reader, and Reading Lists, which allow us to check out the posts we want to view, when we want to view them?

It does matter, if you want to attract new readers.  You need to get yourself on to new RSS Feeds, or they won't ever read your work.

I look to how Tobin was "pimping" our interview from late last week.  I posted the interview just once on Facebook, around my lunchtime.  That's my normal activity.

But Tobin posted the interview several times to Twitter, he posted it on five different spots in Facebook (his fan page, his personal profile, and at least three different Writer's Group discussion group pages); it was referred on from there by his friends and family - and some my friends too!  I wouldn't be at all surprised if he got on the phone and called people to tell them to read it. 

The results were fantastic:  within a week, his was the most popular post in the history of the blog - and not just a bit, but by an additional 25% more views than the next most popular post.

Compare that against other recent interviews and blog posts.  On average (including some recent interviews), I've had only 1/5th of the views as Tobin's interview - over the same period of time.

So there's the answer to the how:  increased readership = social media + word of mouth.  You can only reach so far.  Your reach doubles the moment one other person reposts or retweets your link.  Your reach expands geometrically every time someone else passes on the word.  You need to meet people who are willing to believe in you and point people in your direction.  And you need to return in kind.

But that begs the next big question:  why would someone like me (prefamous) want to increase my readership now - months, maybe years before an actual paying publication contract.

Tobin and I had a good discussion about it.  After all - Tobin needs students for his class, and he needs readers to buy his work; this is one more means of advertising.  Increased exposure makes sense for him.  What benefit is there to me, if I should a) blog at all, or b) make a point of increasing readership?

Tobin would argue that I do have something to sell, and that I need to get off my bum and go direct to Kindle.  I'm old-fashioned and I'm still holding out for the classic print (but more on that in later posts).

But there is an argument to be made about posting regularly and actively marketing my blog, even if I'm a "nobody" in established circles.

Let's say a publisher has received my work, and they want to know more about me.  They can Google me and my blog.  Here's what they're going to see.

Potential:  They can see what other writing styles I'm capable of.  They can see the extent to which I research, what my passions are, and how seriously I take my writing craft.  (Typo spotted post-publication?  Kill it kill it kill it!  Then update the post and pretend like it never happened.)  They can see how much writing experience I have, and what I intend on pursuing.  They're going to see what else I'm working on, or have worked on in the past.  And they're going to see that I'm not afraid to post things that are uncomfortable to talk about.

Thought: Let me never publish a post that hasn't taken more than 4 hours to write and refine (usually spread out over two more more sittings).  And may these posts do more than express my own thoughts; I won't ever be satisfied unless they make the reader think, too.

Audience:  I'm attempting to build up a readership now, well in advance of publication.  Networking is one thing, learning from other people another; but building up a readership, getting people interested in the stories I intend to publish - that's all one great big teaser campaign.  And it shows that I'm ready, willing and somewhat capable of marketing, even when I have "nothing to sell" yet.

Dedication:  I'm not just blarfing whatever comes into my head.  I'm researching.  I'm learning, and processing new information, and putting it into practice.  I'm audaciously contacting new and established authors, publicists, agents, publishers and editors, and I'm putting them through the interview wringer - even though I'm neither an online magazine, nor writer's group, nor a publisher, nor even an established author.  I'm not doing it just for myself, either - though I do learn something new every time I interview someone.  I'm doing it so I can share best practices with others in my position, and so I can advertise great new Canadian writing to audiences here and abroad. And they're going to see that I'm actively writing - more so than ever, with or without their publication contracts.

So do I have something to sell?  Yes - best practices, advertising, and one very prolific writer.  There's no price tag, but I'm still "selling" something.

Do I have something to gain?  Absolutely.

Does everyone benefit, if I continue expanding readership?  Beyond doubt.  I benefit, so do my guests, and so do the readers.

So how, fellow writer, how do you market your blog? And for a bonus question:  how important is it to you that you increase your readership, if you're not getting paid to blog?  Leave your comments below!

Also, if you're new to this blog, can you do me a favour?  Follow me.  I promise, I won't let you down.