The crux is: are the blogs to sell Litopia? Or a writers own work?
It seems there should be room to do both. I'm pretty sure that was your intent Pete?
First and foremost, the blogging area (I pretty quickly fell out of love with “SuperStack” so it’s just called Litopia Writers' Blogs) is for the benefit of members. It's another bonus for your low subscription
(altho Basic members can blog too - hopefully they will upgrade to support us). It was never intended to be a hard sales pitch for Litopia.
Writers have spurts of activity, they need fallow periods in-between bigger writing projects. But paradoxically, they still need to keep the writing flowing, though in a low-stress way. That’s what our blogging area here can do. It’s “proper” writing, it gets properly published and exposes your text to the world. It also allows readers who discover you here to find out more about you... it promotes your own personal social links and there’s an easy way for them to browse and buy books you’ve authored.
But it’s deliberately intended to be low-stress. No pressure to write to a schedule, no pressure to write material that others expect you to write (e.g. if you write long-form romance, you can experiment with literally any other genre here).
For the writer to use Litopia as a blog space to gather readers there needs to be some predictability in order to market and publicise. TYM announces her blog with her newsletter. To do that you have to know when it will be available. Timing is crucial with marketing.
Agreed. But it’s currently not quite that sort of platform, see above.
We are still very much at the early stages, new features are being added constantly (e.g. RSS feeds for individual authors’ posts, now available on your author page).
So if there’s a demand, we could well offer more of what you’re suggesting, scheduled publication, etc. But it would be more as an option for those who want to develop it more as their own writing platform. The two options are quite compatible.
My gut says individual writers bringing their readers to Litopia's Blog is going to result in the readers hanging around and reading more. And that will probably establish the blog more than trying to sell the idea of coming to a Litopia Blog Spot to read random pieces that may or may not interest a reader. It's the genre thing.
If Jason is willing to bring that bit of predictability to a writer who's doing their own marketing I think it would be sufficient.
See below.
That's a big ask. I am just the publisher, not the content creator. I'm not sure that I know how to do that. I'd like to do it.
The immediate solution for those who want a regular publication schedule is to add this to the title of your blog posts:
[JASON – PLS CAN YOU SCHEDULE FOR INSERT DATE]
That’s pretty simple for Jason to do (ask me J if in doubt!) and we can do it immediately.
The longer-term solution requires a bigger coding project. I don’t like the WordPress native interface very much (too techy for many) and it needs quite a lot of customising to suit our own writers’ blogging purposes. I can and will code a better, purpose-made interface, but… (a) I’m moving house! And (b) we need to continue this discussion for a month or two to work out the exact brief / features list.
??? I obviously have not phrased my thoughts on this correctly.
For me if a writer is going to market with a blog then of course they have to write on a schedule. Maybe because I come from print media where a column where you can write every week is a gift. If readers are going to read a blog they won't go randomly to that site hoping a new one is out. Esp not at the beginning.
It seems obvious to me there needs to be some sort of predictability for a writer gathering readers. I see no way shape or form how that affects anyone else's timing or ability on writing a blog. Except they will possibly benefit from another writers regular readers who pause and read other blogs while they are there. It is the basis for sub stacks.
Each post currently gets promoted on our social media, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, with a link back to the post itself. I’m planning to expand social media integration (there’s already a box on the post page for you to write your own social media post… you may/may not have noticed it… but it hasn’t been mentioned to Litopians yet because the integration isn’t completely in place).
I do understand what you’re saying, never fear
And what you say is true.
But maybe less true (ha! That sounds Trumpian… things are either true or they’re not) than it was several years ago. The internet has disrupted continuity and greatly favours “surfing” (as it used to be rather edgily called… actually, it’s just bovine browsing). So we need to be a lot more opportunistic than heretofore. Good topic to discuss
in Huddleration.
Fyi, the first weekly blog digest newsletter has just gone out today, and will go out every Saturday at 6am UK. Any comments very welcome.
The intention with the newsletter is to combine both of the factors we’re discussing, i.e. (a) the anticipated regularity of a weekly newsletter and (b) the resulting happenstance discovery of some interesting new writing / new writer.
