On Blogging Too Much About Writing and Armadillos

Tobias Buckell posted on and about his blog a few days ago, with a interesting chart on his blog’s traffic. He turned off comments some time ago but his traffic increased. This is counterintuitive to a lot of chatty blog marketeers, who overstress the community aspect. If your blog doesn’t have comments, then it’s just a webpage with some fancy PHP tags, right?

That advice is good for beginners or no names like me, but Buckell is published by real publishers (it’s true! I’ve held a book of his before and even read it) and is widely-known, so he will have some audience no matter what. But what he attributes his blogs continued success is its identity:

It wasn’t a blog ‘about writing’ as I’d initially conceived. With readers of my stories and novels being a large part of my readership, I now begin to work on creating a blog that was ‘about’ the sort of stuff I was trying to write about in fiction: technology, futurism, global perspectives.

Any armadillo with opposable thumbs can write about fiction and the toiling to get published, and a lot do, but the armadillos that stand out inject their own interests to set them apart. More, interests that influence the subject matter of the author’s fiction are doubly compelling. Buckell writes sci-fi, so it makes sense that he would post about space and technology with a little politics. It informs his writing so it’s relevant to his “branding” as an author.

Thinking about my own interests (religion/theology, philosophy, economics, exercise/nutirtion, music) seem too broad at first blush, and I don’t really write about anything specific in my fiction since I don’t have a real publication yet. The specifics of the first three, being Christianity, epistemology, and Austrian economic theory/libertarianism. Granted those are three very large areas of knowledge but I see them leaving a scratch in what I write and have written.

Good food for thought if you’re a author-blogger, Buckell’s post, I know some people that already follow it in some form. Maybe I should follow suit?

Photo by memestate.