Of Battling Bloggers and the Zen of “Duh”

I don’t usually like to respond directly to other blogs, but I thought today merited some exception to that rule. See, on Wednesday Kristen Lamb tried once again to whack us in the noggin with the idea that as writers trying to grow an  online audience, blogging about writing is not a good idea.

This is not new. Kristen has been talking about this at least since I started reading after her at the beginning of the year.

Then Austin Wulf, another blogger I like and respect, answered back with a post arguing against Kristen Lamb’s main points. I recommended you read both blogs for yourself if for no other reason than the fact that they represent two very well argued and opposing viewpoints.

But here’s the deal: I’ve been thinking a lot about this blogging thing lately. More importantly I’ve been thinking about audience numbers and how to expand them. Of course I’ve always wanted more readers, but for a long time it was something almost academic, simply a way to fuel my pride about my blogging ability.

But about a month ago something changed. I released an ebook called A Prairie Home Apocalypse or: What the Dog Saw. Many of you who are loyal readers of this blog bought the book, and I thank you. But about two weeks after releasing the book my numbers basically hit a brick wall. I’d sell one every couple of days, but the numbers just weren’t there. I’d tapped out my audience, and now I was swinging in the wind. And I don’t know about you, but the prospect of making money really makes me perk up and pay attention.

So I started thinking about what I could do about it, and what I came up with was this: maybe I shouldn’t be blogging exclusively about writing.

Because I believe it does limit my readership to a certain extent. Looking back over posts of the past, some of the most popular by SEO numbers have absolutely nothing to do with writing. And now that I’m further along in my blogging career SEO is a big part of bringing in traffic.

Now there are clearly writers that can pull off writing about writing and garner an audience by the boatload, but as far as I can tell all of those writers are named Chuck Wendig. I am not named Chuck Wendig, nor do I have even an iota of the man’s skill in crafting pithy punchy posts.

Which is why you may have noticed in the past few weeks, that I haven’t been writing as much about writing. Instead I’ve been dabbling in other topics that interest me to see what kind of reaction I can get from the audience at large. This is not to say that I’ll never blog about writing again, but after all this time, I’m finally starting to think maybe Kristen was right all along. And even though it did take me a while to realize it, I’m not ashamed.

Sometimes you have to understand something for yourself. You hear it over and over, and one day it finally clicks and you’ll say, “You know that thing everyone tried to tell me I should do for all those years. Maybe I should give that a shot.”

And the people who tried to tell you for all those years are smacking their heads with their palms and saying, “Yes, what a brilliant idea. Maybe you should try that.”

And that’s okay. Because sometimes you just have to learn it on your own.

Addendum: don’t worry. The economics post was a bomb, so you won’t have to worry about seeing Money Mondays anytime soon.

Addendum 2: I have a new/old short story out for the Kindle. It’s a terrifying little tale that mixes science fiction and horror into a delightfully spine-tingling concoction that I call Derelict. Maybe you should check it out.

A Cure for Exploding Head Syndrome

Dear Twitter,

We need to talk. See, there’s this thing you do, not all the time mind you, but on specific occasions that is getting really irritating.

I’m talking, of course, about your practice of trying to be humorous about current events. This is on the whole, not a terrible thing. But two things cause it to become tedious in the extreme.

First, most tweeters aren’t that different.

Second, most tweeters aren’t that funny.

So what you end up with is a tweet stream filled with people making the same exact joke over and over and over again.

Let us take for example the recent non-event that was “The Rapture.” It might behoove us to ask why such a ridiculous notion gained such widespread interest in the first place, but such questions are beyond the scope of this letter. Instead, let me just say that if I had seen one more, “Well, I’m still here guys, hur, hur, hur” tweet on the twenty-first, my head very well may have exploded.

Can you imagine the mess that would have made, Twitter? Can you imagine the look of shock on my wife’s face if she had walked into the room and found my body crumpled on the floor amid the shattered wreckage of what had once been my shapely and brilliant head? Not so funny now is it?

I suppose that in some ways this phenomenon is an inevitable part of developing an ecosystem of information between individuals that all live on the same planet, but it is irritating all the same. This is why I’m send out a call to you to do your part to prevent head explosions.

And just how can you do this? Why, by using the Double Bass Test of course.

What’s that? You’re not familiar with the Double Bass Test? Well then allow me to enlighten you with a quote from the best time-traveling romantic detective ghost story ever written, Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

“I’m a private detective.”
“Oh?” said Kate in surprise, and then looked puzzled.
“Does that bother you?”
“It’s just that I have a friend who plays the double bass.”
“I see,” said Dirk.
“Whenever people meet him and he’s struggling around with it, they all say the same thing, and it drives him crazy. They all say, ‘I bet you wished you played the piccolo.’ Nobody ever works out that that’s what everybody else says. I was just trying to work out if there was something that everybody would always say to a private detective so that I could avoid saying it.”
“No. What happens is that everybody looks very shifty for a moment, and you got that very well.”

The essence of the Double Bass Test is in asking yourself, “Is this joke so obvious that thousands of other people may be making it even as we speak?” If the answer is yes then don’t make the joke.

The Double Bass Test can also be useful in everyday life as our quote illustrates. Of course there will be times when a Double Bass Joke slips through the cracks, but on the whole you will be well served by following this principle, and thousands of beautiful heads everywhere can be saved from an awful and gruesome demise.

Sincerely,

Albert Berg

P.S. My book is on sale in the Kindle store for 99 cents. I’m not very good at promoting these things, but if you were on the fence because of the price (and believe me I know what it’s like to balk at paying three dollars for a book because you just don’t have the expendable cash) then maybe this is a good time to snatch it up. I’ll probably keep this sale going until the end of the week. So there’s that.

P.P.S.

Yesterday was National Towel Day and nobody told me. This makes me sad.

On the Diagnosis and Treatment of Acute Perfectionitis

Recently I received an email notification about this blog post in my inbox. It took me a little off guard because I didn’t remember when I had subscribed to this particular blog. But when I read the post I remembered. It had just been a long time since the blog had updated.

In the post itself the blog’s author discussed how growing doubt and uncertainty had kept her from posting anything in over a month, how that she had agonized over whether her writing was really good enough and how people would receive her work. It was a beautifully written piece, and I thought it was terribly courageous for this woman to share her fears so freely.

She’s not the only one with this problem either. I suffer from the same thing every week, and I suspect some of you do too.

“But Albert,” you may say, “Your blog updates every day (barring Sundays.) Surely you’ve conquered those demons of self doubt by now.”

Nope. Sorry to say I haven’t. See I suffer from a little thing called perfectionitis. Totally a real disorder. Not one I just made up as I was typing that sentence at all.

Perfectionitis is that feeling you get when you look back over your blog post and it just doesn’t look quite right. Something’s off. Maybe it doesn’t flow the way you wanted it to. Maybe it meanders from the originally prescribed topic. Maybe you can’t think of a third thing for your list of maybes.

You start to panic. “This is crap,” you think to yourself. “If I post this they’ll eat me alive. All my followers will leave and never return. Oh despair!”

Calm. Down.

You’re going off the rails. What you really need is a healthy dose of Truth to straighten you out. So here goes:

Truth Number One: your blog is not perfect.

Face it. You made a mistake somewhere along the way.

There’s a typo in your post somewhere. That sentence you’re closing the post with just doesn’t really give a good feeling of conclusion.  You can’t think of a good third thing in your list of things that might be wrong with a blog post (seriously this one gets me every time.)

Whatever. Nobody’s perfect. I’m not perfect. You’re not perfect. We aren’t going to bat a thousand every game. This is a fact of life. Deal with it.

Fact Number Two: it doesn’t matter.

Here’s a little tidbit that will shock your socks off: Your readers do not hate you. They are not sitting at the edge of their chairs peering into their screens and thinking, “Aha! I found a typo! All my months of waiting have finally paid off. To the comments!”

Probably they’re people just like you. They’re reading your blog because they think you might have something interesting to say. The truth is, most people want to like your blog.

They aren’t looking for a reason to leave. They’re looking for a reason to stay.

You do not have to be perfect.

Fact Number Three: consistency is just as important as quality.

Please note that I did not say that quality is unimportant. This is another area where you need that magic quality of balance. Yes, you should be concerned with how well you’ve written your blog. Yes, you should check your work as best you can.

But if you can’t get it perfect post it anyway.

Here’s a fact that probably won’t shock you. Almost every website that I visit regularly updates regularly. My favourite blogs are the ones that have new posts multiple times a week. And not all those posts have to be perfect and wonderful for me to keep coming back to those blogs.

A while back, Chuck Wendig made a few posts about playing the game Minecraft. I have zero interest in Minecraft, but I didn’t say, “Well Chucky I’ll be taking my blog reading services elsewhere thank you very much.” Because the next day he had another post and another one on the day after that, they had something I could learn from.

Bottom line is this: we are creatures of habit. If you post the single greatest blog post in the history of the world and then stop, chances are no one is going to notice. If you want to gain any kind of following you have to keep pushing through that demon of doubt.

And who knows? You might not love that blog post but someone else might. Often we criticize ourselves so harshly we forget to see the good in our work.

So that’s my two cents worth. I hope that it’s given you some encouragement. But if not, then stick around. I’ll try something else tommorow.

How to Ignore Perfectly Good Advice in Three Easy Steps

You are not alone.

You ever notice how often that phrase pops up in commercials? Do you ever feel a little creeped out by it? Maybe you look around the house to make sure that there’s no one there with you. Well if you do, then you are not alone.

But all silliness aside, as a writer you really aren’t alone. There are hundreds and thousands of other writers out there, from all different levels of the skill spectrum, and many of them are eager and willing to help you out on your journey toward the fun and lucrative world of being a published author.

This is a good thing. Sometimes.

But sometimes it can be overwhelming. There are lots of great people out there with tons of knowledge, and lots of great advice to give out. They’ve been there, they’ve done that, and they know all the mistakes you’re going to make if you’re not careful. You’d be a fool to ignore them.

Except.

Except sometimes their advice doesn’t work for you. And sometimes it might actually contradict other advice you’re getting from equally credible sources.

This is something I’ve thought about quite a bit recently because it happened to me in a big way. Let me explain.

I started blogging seriously solely because of the influence of one Kristen Lamb, media expert and all around awesome person. Her blog is an invaluable resource on how to leverage social media as an author, as well as having great tips on plotting and structure.

(Also she has a book entitled We Are Not Alone. How’s that for your freaky coincidence?)

She encourages writers to do things like start a regular blog, get on Twitter and Facebook, and for the love of Bob use your writing name wherever you can.

As you may be able to tell, I’ve taken most of her advice to heart. But one of her bits of social media wisdom is this: Blog about what you write about.

You may be noticing that I am in fact blogging about writing. I do not write about writing. Except now. Which doesn’t count.

But I didn’t make the choice to pass on that particular piece of advice at a whim. I went through a process of thought and introspection which I’ve boiled down into three steps.

If someone’s giving you advice you’re not sure about maybe this will help.

1. Listen

This is very important. Sometimes a piece of advice might not be for you, but if you dismiss it out-of-hand then you’re doing yourself a disservice. At least give the person the benefit of the doubt that they’re not just blowing smoke. They want to help you. Don’t ever ignore that.

When I first read Kristen Lamb’s advice, I didn’t just snort and say, “Well that’s stupid. I’m not doing that.” I listened. I gave the idea room to take root in my mind.

2. Think

Now that you’ve got the bit of advice in your head, mull it over, do your best to understand it. If you can, try to incorporate it into your process. Even if it doesn’t feel natural at first, give it a try. If it doesn’t work for you try to understand why it doesn’t work. There may be some deeper kernel of truth within the advice that may be able to benefit you.

“Blog about what you write about” is really a great piece of advice. Kristen’s deeper point is this: we need to connect with our potential readers not just other writers. And that’s something I’ve tried to keep in mind as I’ve slowly expanded my writer’s platform.

3. Decide

Because hey, you can really do whatever you want to do. Ignoring advice isn’t wrong. If it doesn’t work for you then fine. If it does work for you and improves your craft, even better.

Obviously, I decided not to follow Kristen’s advice. I made my decision mostly because it’s hard to blog on topic when your work-in-progress is a horror story about a monster mulch pile.

I’m gonna talk about what? Organic gardening?

But for someone writing a more conventional genre, say legal thrillers, blogging on topic could be a fantastic opportunity to connect with readers.

The bottom line is that one size does not fit all. You need balance. You shouldn’t reject advice simply because you don’t feel like doing it. But neither should you feel obligated to go on following advice that just isn’t working out for you. You have to use wisdom and discernment, and consider which path is best for you.

And that’s my advice. You know what to do with it.

How to Win

I kinda like to argue. I don’t know why. Maybe I’ve got some kind of confrontational personality disorder.

I used to argue stuff I didn’t even believe just to enjoy the verbal sparring involved in trying to prove my point. I was addicted to the idea of the win, The moment when I had back my opponent into  a logical corner and they’d have to throw up their hands and say, “Clearly Albert, your’s is the superior intellect. I concede your point and reject my previous position.”

Except that never happened. No matter how well I argued, people would leave the conversation believing the same thing they had always believed, thinking the same way they had always thought.

I came to the conclusion that most people’s minds were fixed like concrete, that once an idea had taken root there no amount of logic could serve to pull it out. The idea of the win was a myth.

But recently I’ve been giving the win some more thought. Winning arguments doesn’t work. No matter how many facts you have at your disposal most people will go on believing what they’ve always believed. But you can change minds. How?

You have to win people.

“Win people?” you may ask. “What does that mean?”

Winning people is all about connection. It’s about creating friendships. It’s about being a nice person.

The best way to make someone see your point of view is to first make them like you. It sounds simple enough, but it’s a fact that most of our society chooses to ignore. Take for instance, the most recent presidential elections. Political pundits took great joy in dissecting the minutia of the different candidates campaign platforms, their political plans and economic strategies.

And in the end the man who won was the candidate who was the most likable.

This is coming from a guy who’s pretty staunchly conservative, by the way. I watched the campaign and I didn’t agree with most of Barak Obama’s policies, but even I had to admit that the man was charismatic and engaging. I enjoyed listening to him say things I disagreed with more than I enjoyed listening to McCain say (some) things that I agreed with.

We can moan and whine all we want about how unfair it is that people make decisions based on personal feelings, but in the end it doesn’t matter. The world we live in is not based on logic; it is based on likability.

Winning people isn’t just for politicians. It’s a good idea for everyone who wants to make an impact on the world, including us writers.

We want to get our work out into the world some day, and we want people to buy it. That’s why it’s so important that we nurture friendships and make connections that will leave a positive impression on the people around us.

The internet has expanded our capacity to make those connections in an amazing way, but it’s up to us to use that capability wisely. Time spent on Twitter and Facebook doesn’t have to be wasted. If we do it right we can forge friendships that may prove invaluable for us later on. At the very least we’re getting our name out there into the world, so that one day when we’re finally newly minted authors with books on the shelves of a real bookstore those friends we’ve made over the years will be there to buy them up.

Bottom line: we should never ever reject the power of relationships or forget the importance likability. Winning people may take longer than winning an argument, but time spent winning people is never wasted.

The Gentle Art of Making Enemies

There are some people who pine for the glory days of high school. They look back in fondness on the experiences they had, the friendships they made, the carefree life they had to leave behind for drudgery of adulthood.

I am not one of these people. High school sucked for me in a big way. I can look back on that time of my life and say honestly that I can not think of one unequivocally good thing that happened to me during that entire four years of my life. I made far more enemies than friends, I fumbled my way through social interaction, and generally hated every minute of it.

And it was mostly my own fault. I didn’t think so at the time of course. I thought it was all those other people who were just plain mean and didn’t understand me because I was so much smarter than they were. Yeah, see what I mean? I was kind of a jerk back then.

And I’m still kind of a jerk now. Well, maybe jerk isn’t the best word for it. The point is, I love to argue. I don’t mean for it to be offensive, I just like to debate things. I like to think it keeps my mind sharp.

The problem is that people don’t usually take disagreement well. For most people arguments are always personal, and always emotional. They assume that if I attack their opinion I’m attacking them in some way.

So I’ve had to adapt. Specifically I’ve had to learn a little self control; I’ve had to make conscious decisions not to jump into arguments simply for the sake of argument. And I have to tell you it hasn’t been easy.

You know that rule about not talking politics on the internet? That rule was invented for me. Because I love politics, and I love arguments. I could jump into all the political chatter and start a debate in no time. But I could also seriously tick off some people who I consider to be friends.

I’ve only been on Twitter for a couple of months and in that short amount of time I cannot count the number of times I’ve had to tell myself, “It’s okay, Albert. Just back off and don’t say anything. You’ll be fine.”

The problem is no one is dispassionate about their political opinion. People on both sides of the aisle have woven their political philosophy into very fabric of their being, and attacking that philosophy is only going to lead to anger and distrust.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that there is a vital place for political debate in our society. But it isn’t here.

Here is a place about writing and life. Here is where I’m trying to build your loyalty and trust. So that one day when I’m published you’ll say to yourself, “Hey, I know that Albert Berg. He’s the guy who wrote that one blog post about the cockroach in the spaghetti noodles. Maybe I’ll check his stuff out.”

If I’m trying to sell you my book I really don’t care whether you’re a Republican or Democrat.

So go ahead. Post your political ramblings on Facebook and Twitter if you must. You won’t be getting a response from me. But if you like, you can imagine me clenching my teeth and quietly screaming to myself, begging my fingers not to type out a snarky reply. And if I die of a stress related heart attack at the tender age of thirty four, you’ll know the reason why.

How to Make Tweet Potato Casserole

I’ve been on Twitter for a total of something like two weeks at this point, which I believe makes me completely qualified to tell you what you’re doing wrong.  Just as soon as someone can explain to me what a hashtag is.

Okay, so maybe I’m not a social media expert, but in the short time I have been on Twitter I’ve noticed there are some people who should know better making some obvious mistakes.  Some of these could apply to any tweeter, but mostly I’m focusing on people like me, writers who hope to use social media to grow their support.  I can’t tell you the secrets to having a thousand followers, or how to tweet your way to riches, because I haven’t done either of those things.  But I can give you some common sense advice from the eyes of a beginner.

So here it is, the Albert Berg Definitive Guide to Tweeting Well.

1. Back Off

When I click on a Twitter user to check out their feed, I’m interested in one thing right off the bat: how often does this person tweet?  Because I don’t care if you’re the greatest thing since the invention of the hashtag, if you’re updating more than four or five times an hour on average, I’m not clicking that “Follow” button.  Why? Well, because I have to read all that stuff.  I mean, I don’t have to, but if I’m just going to ignore you, then what was the point in following you in the first place?  I am amazed by how many people don’t get this one.

I think it often happens because they think about themselves before they think about the people who are following them.  This may be fine for teenagers in high school, but as writers, we need to think about the readers of our tweets in the same way we might think of the readers of our books.  We’re doing them a service.  We owe it to them not to waste their time.

2. Balance

As authors we’re likely interested in social media as a way to connect with potential readers.  In a way, our twitter feed is one big sales pitch for ourselves.  However, that doesn’t mean that we can use our twitter feed as a constant advertisement for our stuff.  Well, okay, yes, we can. But who’s going to care?

When I first signed up with twitter, I looked up the author G. Wells Taylor’s feed.  Now let me preface what I am about to say with this:  I love G. Wells Taylor.  The man is an inspiration as an independently published writer, and I will take every chance I can to encourage people to read his stuff.  In fact you should go to manybooks.net right now and download his book When Graveyards Yawn.  It’s fantastic work and it’s totally free.  BUT.  The man does not understand Twitter.  Oh, sure he obviously comprehends the mechanics of the whole thing, but he has no idea how to connect with people.  His twitter stream is just a soulless stream of sales pitches for his work.  One tweet after another about, “This book is available here,” and “Go check out my latest and greatest” etcetera ad nauseam.  Consequently the man has an extremely small following compared to what his platform could be considering the quality of his books.

Sure, it’s fine to link to your stuff from time to time, but you need to remember to tell people that there’s a person behind the pitch, hopefully a person that they’ll like and connect with.

On the other hand, if you spend all your time talking about the funny thing your dog did, I’m not going to connect with that either.  This is where the balance comes in.  If you are a writer, I am following you because I am interested in you as a writer.  If you spend all your time talking about banalities, I’m going to be turned off fast.

3. Be a Friend

When I started Twitter, I thought it was a numbers game.  I thought if I didn’t have huge numbers of people following me I didn’t matter, so I did my best to be clever and interesting in the hopes of attracting new followers.  I still do my best to be clever and interesting, but now I’ve had a perspective shift.  I’ve realized that Twitter at its heart is about connecting to other people, engaging them in conversation.  This means give and take. Now sure, I’d still like to have a bunch of people following me, but the more important connections are the ones that I take time to develop and grow.  I’d rather have ten good twitter friends than a thousand casual followers.  Why?  Because those ten true friends are going to be far more likely to spread the word about what I’m doing to their followers, and if they’ve taken the time to make that human connection with some of their followers, then those people may talk about my work as well.  This is called word of mouth.  It’s the holy grail of advertising.  And you can do it through friendship.

That’s all I’ve got.  It’s all simple stuff that seems like commons sense to me, but maybe it can help you improve your tweeting game.  And hey, I really am new to all of this, so if you think I missed something or totally got it backward, let me know in the comments.  I’d love to hear what I’m doing wrong.