So I recognize that I need a web presence. I also recognize that I'm a little overextended right now. When I was writing full time, I had plenty of time to maintain this blog, my myspace and facebook accounts, my mog page, and whatever other social networking sites I could find.
Now that I'm back to teaching full time, though, I barely have time to write, let alone network and blog.
This blog is supposed to serve two purposes: One is simply to give me an outlet to pontificate on popular culture. Those of you who know me personally understand that this is a pretty significant need, and the existence of this blog is probably helping me maintain my personal relationships better, since I'm not burdening my loved and liked ones with my know-it-all opinions about stuff.
The second purpose is to help me sell books. Here, I think this blog is failing. My focus is not narrow enough to attract much of an audience outside of people who know me either personally or professionally, so I can't be like Cory Doctorow and leverage my blog audience into a bunch of book buyers who will overpraise my didactic, dull young adult novel. Well, my young adult novels are neither didactic nor dull, but what I mean is that Cory Doctorow has a huge blog audience that he can whip up into some excitement over his books. I have a tiny blog audience and even if I whip you all up into a frenzy, and I hope I do, we're still only talking about a handful of books. Don't get me wrong--I appreciate every purchase--but I haven't built a big loyal blog audience that I've been able to convert into a big loyal book buying audience.
And I don't have a large enough fan base for my books to drive a lot of people here to be fascinated by what I think about VH1 Celebreality or whatever.
I'm averaging 40 hits a day right now, and if you subtract from those 40 the people who are looking for stuff about the novel called Girl in a Cage, people looking for BDSM porn involving cages, and people searching for pictures of people who've appeared on Celebrity Fit Club, I'm probably down to 10 or 15.
And I appreciate those 10 or 15 people a lot-- but I'm not sure pontificating at a handful of friends is something I should be spending time on right now.
I'm wondering if I should just post stuff here about what I'm writing and what's happening with my writing career, since I think that would be of some interest to people discovering me through my books, and just bag the pop culture stuff for a while, thereby simplifying my life and forcing me to devote more of my limited time and creative energy to writing I can actually get paid for.
But I don't know.
