Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Blogging Will Bring You A Bigger Audience Than Writing

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 My blog is relatively small but rapidly growing. 12105 page views last month according to blogger stats, about 400 a day.

Which is not a lot compared to the top bloggers in my category. But it is perhaps a whole lot more daily readers than writers who stick to print have.
Laura Miller mourns the decline of reading in her Salon article. It is not true, however, that people are reading less. They are reading more. However what they are reading has changed. They read on their laptops, and largely read things produced for people who read in that medium–blogs, online newspapers and journals, Facebook, Twitter.
Here are some excerpts from Laura’s piece on NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month:
NaNoWriMo is an event geared entirely toward writers, which means it’s largely unnecessary. It was yet another depressing sign that the cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken over by the narcissistic commerce of writing.
I say “commerce” because far more money can be made out of people who want to write novels than out of people who want to read them. And an astonishing number of individuals who want to do the former will confess to never doing the latter. “People would come up to me at parties,” author Ann Bauer recently told me, “and say, ‘I’ve been thinking of writing a book. Tell me what you think of this …’ And I’d (eventually) divert the conversation by asking what they read … Now, the ‘What do you read?’ question is inevitably answered, ‘Oh, I don’t have time to read. I’m just concentrating on my writing.’”
Yet while there’s no shortage of good novels out there, there is a shortage of readers for these books. Even authors who achieve what probably seems like Nirvana to the average NaNoWriMo participant — publication by a major house — will, for the most part, soon learn this dispiriting truth: Hardly anyone will read their books and next to no one will buy them.


So I’m not worried about all the books that won’t get written if a hundred thousand people with a nagging but unfulfilled ambition to Be a Writer lack the necessary motivation to get the job done. I see no reason to cheer them on. t’s the readers who are fragile, a truly endangered species. They don’t make a big stink about how underappreciated they are; like Tinkerbell or any other disbelieved-in fairy, they just fade away.
Rather than squandering our applause on writers — who, let’s face it, will keep on pounding the keyboards whether we support them or not — why not direct more attention, more pep talks, more nonprofit booster groups, more benefit galas and more huzzahs to readers? Why not celebrate them more heartily? They are the bedrock on which any literary culture must be built. After all, there’s not much glory in finally writing that novel if it turns out there’s no one left to read it.
Consider turning away from the self-aggrandizing frenzy of NaNoWriMo and embracing the quieter triumph of Kalen Landow and Melissa Klug’s “10/10/10″ challenge: These two women read 10 books in 10 categories between Jan. 1 and Oct. 10, focusing on genres outside their habitual favorites. In her victory-lap blog post, Klug writes of discovering new favorite authors she might otherwise never have encountered, and of her sadness on being reminded that “most Americans don’t read ANY books in a given year, or just one or two.” Instead of locking herself up in a room to crank out 50,000 words of crap, she learned new things and “expanded my reading world.” So let me be the first to say it: Melissa and Kalen, you are the heroes.
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Many bloggers have a holy grail–publishing a book.
However, online is where our readers are, and online is where we are likely to find our biggest readership and influence.

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  1. Hi Emma, Excellent. 50,000 total page views by Jan, or in Jan alone? The latter would make you the most read blogger in the UK. Congratulations!!

  2. I am constantly surprised that so many people read my blog (over 50,000 in Jan) but I think it's because blogs can be easily digested, often are thought provoking more than information giving and are very real.

    I love to write but I also love to read, I read a fiction book a week, often have 3 or 4 text books on the go and love reading news and blogs. It's the reading which stimulates my writing and I find it hard to understand why people don't love to read.

  4. Thanks for visiting my humble abode too. My blog has been going as long as yours, but I'm not such a frequent poster. That'll be the main reason for the difference.

  5. Hi Radical Believer, Welcome to my blog. Perhaps I shouldn't have posted stats. I have been at it for 17 months now, of course. However, I realised very soon that if it was readers I wanted I would find more online than through print.