Blogging

Morris Rosenthal has a very popular website and blog on Self-Publishing among other things. (He is the author of a popular book on that subject.) He is in process of writing a book and putting the draft online as he goes (here) on Building an Author Platform or Author websites. All this is a preface to some comments he makes on blogging in the chapter entitled Why Blogging Isn't The Ideal Author Platform . Some his thoughts here are generic to blogging and not just for unknown authors trying to get noticed. Here are some random thoughts from the chapter I think my readers might enjoy:

Blogging is an addiction. Blogging is a bad addiction for most authors. There are exceptions to the rule, highly disciplined authors who relegate their blog to the once a month update about the progress of their latest book, but most of us fall into the colossal waste of time category as bloggers.

Blogging sucked three years of creative writing out of my brain, and it can do it to you as well.

Blogs take on a life of their own and drag the blogger into an endless attempt to maintain and amuse a subscriber base, preaching to the converted, and waking up in the middle of the night to scribble down a germ of an idea for the next days mandatory post. Most bloggers lead lives of quiet desperation, quiet because nobody reads their blogs and desperation because they don't know how to stop. If I could sum up the problem with blogs in one 90's concept, it would be the lack of closure. Blogging never reaches a logical conclusion, it just goes on and on until the blogger breaks the vicious cycle and walks away, or finds a sort of peace six feet under. If Dante was writing today, one of the punishments of the damned would surely be perpetually spending the night in Hell writing blogs, and the day reading them.

You get the idea. (I love this!) You should the rest even if you aren't an aspiring author (read the rest here). Note, with all this said, Mr. Rosenthal updates his own blog several times a week....