Straight Talk About Blogging and Bookselling

A couple of months ago I read this blog article about how with Elon Musk fucking Twitter, people are going to start blogging again.  I do not agree.  At least I don't think there will be a flood of people doing that.  Like how some hipsters have gone back to cassettes, I'm sure there will be some who go back to Blogger or Wordpress, but I doubt it will be a lot.  But it got me doing some hard thinking about blogging in general.

Here's my first reason I don't think blogging makes a comeback:  it's completely different than social media.  Social media posts are short; on Twitter you only have 256 characters.  Not words, characters.  If you want to say something longer you can add more posts as sort of a thread, but still.  Facebook you can write more, but you can't write as long as a lot of blog posts.  Then you have TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and others that barely use words at all.

Starting a blog because you're pissed at Elon Musk is like going back to cassettes or if you're pissed at the cost of gas you buy a horse.  It's really a whole different thing and not all that practical.  Sure, you can write more, which is kind of an issue.  I mean maybe with all this space you feel compelled to write more because a 256-character blog post would look pretty lame.  I mean that's basically one paragraph.  From that article above, here's what it'd look like at 256 characters (counting spaces):

I know how it is: your readers started fading from Facebook all through 2022, disgusted by invasive advertising and slimy tactics that spy on your every move. They are also fed up by those bizarre, arbitrary algorithms that send you to Facebook jail for po

Yeah, that's barely anything.  Not even two complete sentences!  So, yeah, it's pretty different.  One does not really "replace" the other in the same sense.

Here's a truth bomb for you:  Blogs are old tech.  Blogs came about in the early 2000s (maybe the late 90s?) as simplified web pages.  It was a way for Luddites (or just people who don't have a lot of time to learn coding) to have a web page without having to learn HTML, Java, and other programming languages or buy a fancy web page creation program.  Plus you didn't have to worry about hosting and uploading by FTP and all that happy shit we did in the mid-to-late-90s.

Because they're old tech, blogs don't really work so well in the modern world.  I mean, come on, try typing a blog entry on your phone.  I dare you!  Unless you have a specialized keyboard or something, it's a pain.  I type all my blog entries on desktop computers or sometimes my Chromebook.  Never on my phone.  Whereas it's super-duper-easy to do a TikTok, Snapchat, or Instagram post on your phone.  It's not too hard to do a Tweet or Facebook because there's a lot less typing.  And no formatting or any of that shit.  At most you can attach a photo or video, right?

I'm just saying, it's not an apples-to-apples thing here.  It's like apples to whatever the prehistoric forerunner to apples was.  Blogs don't have the ease and convenience of social apps in the age of "smart" phones.

When I commented on the article about how all I see is blogs dying, the author told me to "up my SEO game."  Which is kind of a joke.  Who finds blogs with search engines?  I rarely ever do.  How'd I even find that article?  A "friend" posted it on Facebook.

Another truth bomb coming in hot:  people like me are no one and our blogs are nothing.  It doesn't matter what headlines I use or keywords or whatever.  I'm nothing and so Google or Siri or Alexa or whatever isn't going to show me in the top of the results--probably not even the top 10,000--unless by some weird miracle someone is looking for something super-duper specific.  The only reason I'd expect anyone to find me by a search engine is if I pissed someone off and they're looking to dox me.  So maybe they put "PT Dilloway" in their search (or ask Siri or Alexa or whatever) and it brings this blog up.  It'd be great if I had fans who were doing that, but come on, who are we kidding?

"Write great headlines" or "write about something current" or whatever sounds like great advice, but it ignores the basic fact that algorithms are designed not to show pissant little blogs like this at the top of the results.  That is literally how Google algorithms were designed, to show more popular results first.  I can write a review of Avatar 2, but Google isn't going to show that first no matter what headline I use.  It'll show professional reviews for newspapers and sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB first.  Because those are more popular and well-known than this here blog.

The other part of this is that most people rarely ever go past the first page of search results.  Probably less than 1/% go past 5 pages of results.  So your pissant blog on page 900 of the results might as well be invisible.

Unless someone types in (or asks for) something really specific, you are not going to show up in the top of the search engines.  EVER.  Unless you have money like Elon Musk, you can't really advertise your blog in a way to get noticed.  You have about as much chance of winning the lottery as you do of going "viral," especially with old tech like a blog.

The irony there is how can your blog go viral?  Only through social media.  So if you abandon social media for a blog, how are you going to tell people what's on your blog?  Email?  Snail mail?  Cold call people at random?  (Most of the numbers you'd get are probably Luddites who still have landlines so maybe they'd read a blog--if they have a computer.)

Riddle me this:  How is a blog like social media?  The actual way most of us get people to read is pretty much the same as Facebook and Twitter.  We have our little circle of family, friends, and acquaintances and while maybe we hope to be as notable as Stephen King or Neil Gaiman, it's never gonna happen.  All the people who comment on this blog are people whose blogs I comment on.  In other words, they're in my circle.

So I wouldn't worry about headlines or "SEO" or advertising; I would worry about networking.  Comment on other people's blogs and maybe they'll comment back.  How to find other blogs?  Look for people who comment on blogs you follow.  Or if someone like Tony Laplume has some links on the side, go look up anything that sounds interesting and is fairly current.  There's no point commenting on blog posts that are years old; chances are that author has already abandoned the blog and will not even notice.  And of course if any of your social media "friends" post a link to a blog, go check it out.

And, yeah, that's slow and a lot of work and it won't get you nearly as many views and comments and such as going "viral," but it's really all you can do.

You might wonder, why even blog at all?  Good question!  I thought about quitting (again) this year.  I even had a post written.  Then I accidentally published it back in October and quickly deleted it.  And then decided not to redo it.

For me there are a couple of advantages to a blog vs social media.  One, obviously, that I can write longer posts.  There's not the word count limit like Twitter or even Facebook.  Two, I don't need to use video/pictures like TikTok, Instagram, or Snapchat.  For someone who's gross looking and sounding, video and pictures are not gonna work.  They'd repel people instead of attract them.  Three, and maybe most important to me, is that blogs are more archivable.  If I Tweet or Facebook something, it can be almost impossible to find it later.  Let's say in a couple of years, I want to see if I watched some fairly obscure movie like Max Cloud, I can bring up the blog and type it in the search box and it should come up.  But if I search something more generically-titled like The Selling it still might not come up or be buried behind a bunch of irrelevant entries.  Still, it's better than social media.  The blog I use for my journal is especially good for this as I can just go look up stuff by date if I wonder what I was doing, say, 4 years ago from today.  Or even 18 years ago!  (It goes back to about late 2004, so that's a long time.)

So there are some good things about blogging, but I don't think Gen Z and younger kids really give a shit about that.  Or a lot of other people who are barely literate and thus something like TikTok, Instagram, or Snapchat works better for them because it's mostly visual and auditory.  

The big issue with blogging is discoverability.  That's also the big issue for selling books in general.  I've said before the thing I remember most from my college marketing class wasn't even something from the overpriced textbook.  It was something my professor said:  people can't buy something if they don't know it exists.  For most of us on Amazon, that's the biggest mountain to climb.  There are probably a billion (or more) books on Amazon.  You can have good keywords, a nice cover, and so on, but that still doesn't people are going to find you.

Like with blogs, a critical problem is that quite simply no one is looking for your book.  Or very few people probably are.  Most people read a few well-known authors or in one genre.  I doubt there are a lot of people typing (or asking Alexa for) certain types of books.  And, again, unless you're Elon Musk, you probably don't have the money to do advertising that would actually work.

The best ways you can get people to buy books:

Make one free!  People probably aren't searching a lot for keywords but I imagine there are a lot of cheap assholes looking for free shit.  How do I know?  Every time I make a book free, a bunch of copies get downloaded!  Even books that almost no one has ever purchased for money.  So obviously there are a lot of bargain hunters out there.  That also can work for charging 99 cents.  When I make a book 99 cents because it's shorter or it's the first of a series or something, it usually sells more than if I charge $2.99 or more.  Because, again, people are hunting for deals more than keywords.

The other thing you can do is more about luck, but it's sort of what I was talking about earlier with "circles."  If your book gets into the "Also Viewed" or "More to Explore" or whatever sections on the Amazon page of another book, it can help to drive sales because it's basically making your book more visible.  How can you do this then?  You really can't do it consciously.  I mean you can try to use the same sort of plot, cover, title, etc as a high-rated book in your subgenre, but even then it might not matter.  It is mostly whether the Amazon algorithms bless you.

Anyway, overall I'd say don't expect a lot of blogging or bookselling.  Now let's see if I get more than 2 comments on this post--that aren't by me.