Why this isn't a blog.

I was told that if I want to be a big grown-up author, I should have a blog, whether I want one or not. So, I set up a blog. Then I was told that I shouldn’t waste my time on a blog.

That’s the thing about setting out your stall as an author. As we stumble our way out of the first quarter of the Twenty-First Century, there is so much advice available that you don’t know who you should listen to, and who you should ignore. If I took all the advice that has been thrown at me, I would spend about a hundred hours a week on social media, blogging, writing this and that to raise my profile, and I would have no time to eat or sleep. As for writing books, forget it.

There is such an overload of advice, totally free advice, available at the click of a mouse these days, that you disappear down more rabbit holes than Bugs Bunny, and of course, you encounter conflicting advice, and I mean diametrically opposed views, such as having, or not having, a blog.

So, what is the best thing to do with all this advice? Well, learn from it of course. Listen, take it all in, then go off and see what other authors do. Not the big boys and girls with vast publishing empires behind them, people like me. The people who write a lot of the books that people like you read these days. I spent hours, lots of hours, days, reading through websites, social media, Amazon pages, and what did I learn?

Well, everything and nothing I suppose, but having read all this advice, and soaked up all this information, I can now decide what works for me. Keeping a blog up to date is definitely not my thing. Most people who do so seem to either get bored with them, or make them boring when they run out of ideas anyway, so there doesn’t seem much point. I would much rather write newsletters when I come across something interesting or amusing, but not everything that I come across will work in a newsletter. Those things will go on here. This will be my place for interesting jottings that have nowhere else to go.

So that is why this is definitely not a blog.