Paul Whybrow
Full Member
A couple of years ago, I posted a thread called Things I wish I'd known before starting to write.
After devoting the last ten weeks of my life to resuscitating the abandoned corpse of my Paul Pens blog, I rather wish that I'd been regularly blogging a couple of times a week since 2013. I'm glad to have the resource of the posts I've made on the Colony to populate my blog, but it would have been better to have built it up gradually.
If you're just starting out as a writer, I advise you to start a blog. It needn't necessarily be about writing or reading, but rather whatever subjects interest you—for they're likely to influence your work as an author. Gathering followers to your blog, who come to trust your posts and who interact with you, is a great way of establishing a potential fan base for when you publish your book. Your name will already be out there, which is important in all sorts of ways, including you appearing in search engine results.
The purpose of blogging for me, and for running a website devoted to my Cornish Detective series, which will include a blog about true crimes, is to collect a mailing list of subscribers to notify when I self-publish my next title.
It's common advice to anyone thinking of self-publishing that having an author platform is a good move. Even if you manage to secure a traditional publishing contract, you'll be expected to do self-promotion. Harry Bingham of Jericho Writers has some common sense advice about author platforms here:
Author Platform: What It Is & How To Build It - Jericho Writers
There is one other thing that I wish I'd done before starting to write books, but that involves time travel, as taking a marketing degree would have provided me with a firm grounding in what's needed to promote and sell a book. I'm not a natural salesman.
After devoting the last ten weeks of my life to resuscitating the abandoned corpse of my Paul Pens blog, I rather wish that I'd been regularly blogging a couple of times a week since 2013. I'm glad to have the resource of the posts I've made on the Colony to populate my blog, but it would have been better to have built it up gradually.
If you're just starting out as a writer, I advise you to start a blog. It needn't necessarily be about writing or reading, but rather whatever subjects interest you—for they're likely to influence your work as an author. Gathering followers to your blog, who come to trust your posts and who interact with you, is a great way of establishing a potential fan base for when you publish your book. Your name will already be out there, which is important in all sorts of ways, including you appearing in search engine results.
The purpose of blogging for me, and for running a website devoted to my Cornish Detective series, which will include a blog about true crimes, is to collect a mailing list of subscribers to notify when I self-publish my next title.
It's common advice to anyone thinking of self-publishing that having an author platform is a good move. Even if you manage to secure a traditional publishing contract, you'll be expected to do self-promotion. Harry Bingham of Jericho Writers has some common sense advice about author platforms here:
Author Platform: What It Is & How To Build It - Jericho Writers
There is one other thing that I wish I'd done before starting to write books, but that involves time travel, as taking a marketing degree would have provided me with a firm grounding in what's needed to promote and sell a book. I'm not a natural salesman.
