1 post tagged “tweet”

Tonight at my writing group, we started talking about blogging and micro-blogging and Kelly, one of the group, asked why he should care about blogging. By extension, he was asking why Twitter, or MySpace, or FaceBook.

Fair question.

And one I couldn’t really answer right away. Granted, I’ve attended a workshop at a writer’s conference on the importance of social networking for up-and-coming authors, but I found that I had a hard time articulating my answer. So I thought about it, and it inspired me to write this blog.

A little background, without trying to offend anyone’s sensibilities, but we’re not a young crowd. Not old, but not young. I may be the oldest of the group, or nearly so, at 44. I don’t remember. Kelly may have a year on me.

But the point is, we grew up at a time when we went outside to play with each other, rather than staying inside and texting, or IMing, or blogging, or whatever. But my son, 19 years old, has. He also goes outside. He’s on the swim team for his university, he plays basketball, he runs, you get the idea.

But does that mean we’re too old to text, or blog, or Tweet? Hell no! It just means that we have to spend more time figuring out how to do it.

So to the topic of the blog. I guess that Kelly’s asking, “What’s in it for me?”

There are a lot of easy answers. For one, I’ve lost contact with a lot of my old army buddies. Sure, we can find each other again, maybe, but with something like MySpace, or FaceBook, or LinkedIn, it makes it a lot easier.

It’s also easier to let everyone know what you’re doing, all at once, than it is to send individual emails to all of your friends and family. By blogging, they all get the news at once, therefore, everyone stays informed.

For me, it’s also a way to connect with other authors and potential fans. Maybe that’s a bit conceited on my part to think about fans when I don’t even have anything in print yet, but I’m in this for the long haul. I want to get the mechanism in place now so that when I do get published, I’m not scrambling to do all of this then.

If I have a book picked up for publication, it’s going to create a bunch of work with editing and re-editing, etc. The last thing I want to do is try to build my social network then. For me, I’d rather have it in place so that when the time comes, I can announce when my book is going to hit the shelves.

So, as an aspiring author, I’m going to blog, and tweet, and MySpace, and FaceBook, and anything else I can do to build up potential interest in my writing. But on top of that, I’m actually having a lot of fun doing it.

~Doug