Friday, June 10, 2011

More blog behavior I don't understand

A year ago literary agent Rachelle Gardner had a contest over on her blog for writers to send in their best one-sentence summaries of their books. The whole thing was about how a one-sentence pitch is important because it answers the question “What’s your book about?” and generates interest in the book. Something like 500 writers responded in the comments below the post and a winner was selected.

If you were a reader like moi and you liked any of the pitches you read it didn't matter because there were no links to any of the authors. There wasn’t even a link to the writer who won. I mean, the writers were pitching to Ms. Gardner, an agent, but weren't they also pitching to me, the reader who stumbled upon the post a year after it was written?

It is amazing now that if you’re an author, virtually anything you write anywhere is promoting your writing. If you contribute to someone else’s blog though (with a comment or whatever), the responsibility falls on the shoulders of the blog owner to make it so that your contribution has legs. Because if I like something you’ve written somewhere and after a few seconds there’s no easy way for me to read more by you, I move on. It happens so fast I almost don’t even think about it.

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