Writers' Blogs and the Mighty PR

I have never made a secret of the purpose of this blog. It is intended primarily as a way of showcasing my writing, of becoming well enough known that an agent or publisher might become interested.

There are several flaws in this theory, perhaps the most obvious being that publishers and agents don't read blogs. They are far too busy wading through the piles of waste paper submitted to them every day to ever surf the blogs. Even so, the blog has had its small successes, being the means to a weekly column in a local paper and selection for the abortive television documentary on blogs.

Realistically, however, I have to face the fact that such lucky accidents do not happen every day. If the blog is ever to achieve its aim, I am going to have to find ways of making it much more noticeable than it is.

By blog standards, it has done very well so far and now receives about 4,000 hits a day (and 600 sessions - a much better indicator of visitors). But this is small change compared to the blogs on the A-list, the heavyweights of the blogosphere. They number their links in the thousands, never mind their hits and sessions.

I have come to realize that it's incoming links that make the blog; the more you have, the higher your Google Page Rank (PR) and the higher you will appear in any search result. And, if you can achieve a link from a blog on the A-list, then your PR will really begin to rise. It's quality as well as quantity that counts.

Unfortunately, writer's blogs will never achieve links from the A-list bloggers. Why? Take a look at a few of them and you will find that they deal in news and oddities; they either mimic the newspapers or consist of links to weird and wonderful things on the net. They can have no interest in literary blogs whose stock in trade has rather more shelf life than the ephemera they subsist upon. Understand, I am not deriding such blogs; they have a job to do and they do it very well, hence their popularity. But writers need to face the fact that there is no hope of salvation from that quarter. If we are ever to become serious contenders in the PR race, another strategy must be found.

A few days ago it occurred to me that writers need a few heavyweight blogs of their own; blogs with enough incoming links to be regarded as quality by Google. If such a blog were then to link to the blogs of writers, each blog so linked would increase in importance too. We would, in fact, be creating our own little corner of the blogosphere where our rules dominated, rather than those of the A-list.

Not having the time to set up such a blog on my own, I looked around to see if there were any that we could use as a starting point. And I chose Deborah Woehr's blog, The Writer's Buzz (TWB), as the most likely candidate. Deborah has already established several blogs and TWB has a sizeable membership. She also posts very useful and informative articles and, by chance, had posted recently regarding the future direction of TWB. I wrote a comment, outlining my ideas. If you are interested, I strongly recommend that you have a read of her article entitled The Future of The Writers Buzz, together with its comments.

If you're still interested after reading that, have a look at the later articles We Need Our Own Corner of the Blogosphere and Writers' Blog Alliance Poll.

An important part of the strategy we're beginning to evolve is that it must be a united effort. The more writers and readers we can get involved and linking to the blog, the higher we will push the PR and the more benefit it will be to all of us. There are hundreds of writers' blogs out there and each one has its readers. If we can get together and create the central point I envisage, the chances of each one of us being noticed increase dramatically.

I say let's do it!