Aussie Bloggers

I’ve written before about the blog-niche of blog fiction, and the specific troubles and travails it can involve.

(For the purposes of clarification – by blog fiction, I mean something in blog format, and containing mostly fiction. There are a lot of different definitions floating around there – mine is very
general)

Recently, I read a post by a fellow fiction writer. He was asking – why have a personal blog, as well as write fiction? While composing a long and rather windy reply, I happened upon an interesting insight.

I originally started my personal blog with the intention that it would be an adjunct to my fiction blog, read by friends, some fans of my fiction blog, and few others. Months later, the fiction blog still gets the lion’s share of my time and focus.

Guess which one’s in the Top 100 Australian Women’s Blogs list?

Yup. The sideline personal blog. Weird, huh? Not really, come to think of it. See, looking back, I think that I made a crucial but not fatal error in my logic process. I thought like a vaguely successful writer with a fan base. I’m not a vaguely successful writer. I didn’t have a fan base. And the important thing to know about fiction blogs is this – <b>most first-time visitors won’t come back</b>. The story they read – or skim – won’t be captivating enough, or it will be the wrong genre, or there’ll be a personality mismatch. On the other hand, people visit my personal blog because it’s, umm, personal, and often amusing, and then sometimes they get hooked on my fiction because it’s got the same sort of amusement factor as my personal blog. There are, no doubt, personality mismatches – but people find my personal blog
via links, or comments I’ve left, on blogs belonging to people I get along well with. Which means far fewer personality mismatches.

From this accidental experience, I’ve come up with a new theory of fan-base-creation.

The internet can be used to find people of like mind, and it’s people of like mind who are most likely to read and enjoy a person’s fiction.

There. Bleeding obvious, wasn’t it?

One warning, though. If you’re considering starting a personal blog merely to attract people to your fiction blog – think hard. It requires a genuine effort at sharing yourself – a fake exterior or a simple intellectual discussion is unlikely to help. A personal blog must be exactly that – personal – or it will hinder you more than it helps.