It's been recommended I start a blog so I'll get onto that once I have a few more pieces on kindle & (hopefully) a short story published Tor or somebody.
I don't see any reason to put off starting a blog. I started one myself, and when I keep up with it, it's a lot of fun. The idea of waiting until you've published something in a specific place puts the idea of starting that blog, considered to be very helpful in marketing these days, off into the "someday" rather than the immediate "now". Additionally, let's say you do get picked up by Tor, and your publisher says "Start a blog." You say "Sure thing, boss, I planned on it!" So, you start your blog, and people come read it, but they find only two or three posts, because you just started as opposed to having established the blog already with months and months of previous posts for them to peruse at their leisure. Having started "now" as opposed to "then", you've found your blogging pace, voice, and subject matter. You've already experimented with how many days is the right number of days for you to post, what subjects add variation to the subject you've chosen to focus on, what font colors cause the fewest number of seizures in your readers. Waiting to go through all that until someone tells you to do it "now" seems to me to do a writer a disservice.
"But Mal!" you say. "Won't a blog get in the way of time I could spend writing my story?"
That's always going to be true, whether you start now or later. The benefit of starting now is, as stated above, you get to work out the kinks before you have a large audience watching you fumble for the right balance. If you're going to do it at all, in regards to your other writing and tasks, it doesn't matter whether you start now or then because it's going to effect the time you have in the same ways regardless. It's going to effect a lot of things in the same ways regardless of when you start, but putting it off is just that -- putting it off. Delay. Procrastination.
Marketing begins when you make it begin. It doesn't have to wait for you to have product in hand to sell behind it, and honestly for writers I think it shouldn't wait. Publishers are looking for writers who are more likely to sell than others, and establishing a presence and following and people willing to spread word-of-mouth advertising without a fight goes a long way to convincing publishers you're the kind of author they want to take on.
So blog away. Writing anything is better than writing nothing, and a blog is as good as anything else, I say.
The view I'm trying to train myself to take on marketing is that it will never hurt for a few more people to know about my work. I think that the idea of marketing is so huge (80%?) that it scares authors away. But really its just trying to solve the puzzle of "Good book I've written over here" ------> "Readers who would like it over here".... How do I bridge the gap?
