NRJW: worth paying for?

My local public radio station had yet another pledge drive last weekend, during which an annoyingly cheerful announcer tried to guilt listeners into paying for the shows they were enjoying. "Do your part," the guy urged. "Is it fair to expect other people to pick up the tab for your favorite shows?"

I've been blogging my heart out for 3-1/2 years and nobody has ever paid me a penny. Just now I thought about billing you longtime readers, but I quickly discovered I don't have the nerve to charge for the kind of stuff you get here:


So if you enjoy this blog, maybe you could just tell a couple of friends about it. I still won't make any money, but I'll soak up the extra attention and feel special. And won't that make you feel good?

How to boost blog traffic

Last night I began experimenting with three ideas for increasing traffic to this blog. (Not that there's anything wrong with the old traffic; you're all sweethearts. Mwah!) I joined Stumble Upon, but haven't yet figured out how to use it to lure people over here to NRJW.

Much simpler was signing up for BlogRush and installing their widget--the little black box in my sidebar that says, "From the blogosphere." (Please scroll down a little and take a look. I'll wait here.) I'm not necessarily endorsing the blogs featured there (reload this page to get a fresh batch), but some of them should be of interest to writerly types. Let me know what you think. And if you want to put the widget on your blog, just click the little "BlogRush" button at the bottom of the box. It's extremely quick and easy to set up, and then you do nothing. Seriously. Even if I get only a trickle of new traffic out of that, I haven't wasted any time.

How does BlogRush drive traffic to your blog? Every time you display a post headline from another blog, one of your post headlines is displayed on somebody else's blog. And sooner or later, somebody's going to click over to your blog. What's more, you can refer people (as I am doing right now) and get viewing credits for their traffic in addition to your own. Things should snowball from there.

If you click over from my widget and sign up, I'll get credit for referring you. (Thanks in advance.)

The third thing I'm experimenting with is sharing my, ahem, expertise at Yahoo! Answers. They contacted me a few weeks ago to say they'd linked to some writing advice on my website. Since I'm already answering a lot of writing and afternoon-tea questions via private e-mail, I figured it wouldn't be too much trouble to pop over to Yahoo! Answers once in a while and share my experience in public, with a view to attracting people to my website and this blog.

I'm not married to any of these ideas. If my participatiuon in StumbleUpon or Yahoo! Answers turns out to be boring or sucks up too much of my time, I'll drop them and try something else.

If any of you have tried StumbleUpon, BlogRush, or Yahoo! Answers, how about leaving a comment?

The blogger is IN

I don't want to start off the new year apologizing and explaining; suffice it to say that I needed a vacation from this blog and I took one.

I recently learned that after four years of blogging, Edward Champion called it quits on Return of the Reluctant, a litblog I have often enjoyed and occasionally linked to. Apparently, blogging lost its charm for Ed and he's now spending that time on other things. (I'm wondering if he'll work on perfecting his omelette-making technique, on which I recently advised him.)

Reluctant and I have had ourselves a good time over the years. But I’m a different person now. And I finally confessed to a good friend on the phone that I really had nothing more to say about books or the literary world in the Reluctant format. And I laughed for ten minutes over how absurdly simple the choice was. When something stops being fun, it’s pretty easy to become decisive.

Absolutely. Right there with you, Ed. But you won't hear any teeth-gnashing from my direction over Reluctant's demise; not as long as the blogisphere continues to grow and change and thrive.

While Ed will be missed, good bloggers arrive and depart every day--and that's part of what keeps my list of Daily Read blogs so fresh and interesting. I'm continually editing that list as I discover exciting new blogs, grow bored with old faves and delete them, and "lose" others when people like Ed Champion hang up their blogging hats. Last week I added the eclectic and enormously entertaining blog of actor and author Stephen Fry to my RSS feed reader.

As for my own blog, it passed a milestone last week. It was three years ago on December 26th that I set up a Blogger account and created No rules. Just write. Posting has been sketchy lately, not because I'm tired of blogging like Ed was--although I expect that will happen one day--but because other things demanded my attention. It might take me a little while to get back into the groove, but who knows? Tomorrow I might post something wonderfully profound or entertaining.

Or maybe it will be the next day. In any case, this seemed like a good opportunity to thank everyone who has been reading NRJR. Your comments here on the blog and your e-mails are a big part of the reason why I'm still having a good time doing this.

Confessions of a longtime blogger

I've had the Grumpy Old Bookman on my RSS reading list since even before he said all of those nice things about me, so I'm sorry to see that the old dear has gone on sabbatical.

At least, that's what he's calling it. But I've noticed that when established bloggers take more than a month off, they tend to recover from blogging fever--and they never come back.

Why do people blog? Common wisdom has it that it's all about ego: the blogger believes he has something to say to the world, and a blog of one's own makes a very handy soapbox. Perhaps that's true in the case of the folks who blog for a few months and then wander off, but as someone who will celebrate her three-year blogging anniversary less than a month from now, I reject that answer. Those of us who have been doing this for a while know there's a whole lot more to this obsession than getting people to look at us and listen to what we say. If that was all we wanted from blogging, we'd have said our pieces, repeated ourselves a few times for good measure, and then let our blogs go dark after just a few months.

I don't think I'm all that different from most other longtime bloggers, so I'm assuming that my primary reasons for blogging must be their reasons, too.

Some of us just like to write. And blogging on an almost-daily basis stretches the writer's imagination and creativity. Coming up with fresh ideas for blog posts week after week and month after month is enormously challenging--and some of us relish that challenge. We like the way it feels when we flex our brain muscles.

Oh, sure, we enjoy the attention we get when readers leave comments and other bloggers link to us. And those of us who have books to sell appreciate the opportunity blogging affords us to build name recognition. But I believe the best way to sell more books is simply to write more books and write them better--which means spending all this time here on the blog is more likely to hold me back as a romance author rather than make me famous. And that, I think, neatly answers the accusation that I blog primarily to get attention for my romance novels.

For me, blogging is fun. That's not to say that it's easy. It's just that I enjoy the challenge of hunting up something worthwhile to write about and then expressing myself as well as I can. I've written a lot of inane posts on this blog in the last three years, but I think I've also written quite a few clever, informative, and thought-provoking ones. I'm still here because I think I've got some more of those good posts in me somewhere--and it's incredibly satisfying to dig for them and find them and drag them out and hammer them into shape and then present them to you, the readers of this blog.

When blogging stops being fun, I'll stop blogging and look for some new ways to strain my brain. Maybe that's what Michael Allen, the Grumpy Old Bookman, is doing right now. Whatever the case, I wish him well.

Sorry, we don't have any of that here

Google and the other search engines send a lot of traffic to my blog, and I'm grateful. But sometimes I look at the search strings and wonder what the SEs were thinking. I mean, take a look at this closeup of my StatCounter page and note some of the strange traffic Google has sent me just today. I especially liked:

7 rules for writing chinese

Trust me, I don't even know one rule for writing Chinese. Sorry, friend, but you've come to the wrong blog.

getting pre-published

Um, that makes about as much sense as getting pre-employed or pre-pregnant. You either are or you aren't, right?

music notes for violin rap

A violin rap? I guess it's really true what they say--nothing is too weird for the internet.

If you're a blogger, why not nip down to the Comments and tell us about the weird search strings you've encountered in your traffic logs.

This blog is unsuitable for young children

According to The Blog Readability Test ("What level of education is required to understand your blog?") NRJW can be read by junior-high schoolers.

Goodness, no, I'm not embarrassed. This will make great ammunition for returning fire the next time some disgruntled reader accuses me of writing a blog post that doesn't make any sense. ("What? You don't understand a blog that's written at a junior high school reading level?")

Here's a sampling of some of the blogs I read regularly:

My pal Booksquare writes at the elementary school level.

Will at MSNBC's Clicked writes at my level. (That is, for junior high kids.)

It takes a high school student to read (my favorite blogger) Terry Teachout's About Last Night. Ditto, Ron and Sarah's Galleycat.

Joe Carter's The Evangelical Outpost is for college undergrads. That's not surprising, as once or twice I've had to look up words Joe has used in his posts. (I never finished college.)

How about your blog?

Bad blogging

According to Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger, your first 10,000 blog posts are your worst. He continues:

Like anything - blogging is something that the majority of us are not brilliant at in our early days. I look back at some of the posts I wrote in my first year of blogging and shudder with embarrassment. The mistakes were spectacular and frequent.

I just checked my post count on Blogger and was disappointed to find that since December 27, 2004, I have logged only 807 entries here at NRJW. At this rate, it will be years and years before I write my ten-thousandth entry and get all of my worst posts behind me.

It's no good telling me Darren was speaking metaphorically because the damage is done: I'm already doubting my abilities as a blogger. All this time, I thought I was doing okay. But what if I really stink at this and I'm the only one who doesn't know it? Goodness, I could be the William McGonagall of blogging!

Way to ruin my afternoon, Darren.

The blogger is IN

Greetings, faithful NRJW readers and stoppers-by. The manuscript that has come between me and blogging for the past couple of weeks is finally finished and in the mail to New York (a day late, and yes, I did send an apologetic e-mail to my editor), so this morning I'm putting my blogging hat back on.

As I was perusing some favorite blogs just now, it struck me that I haven't added any new blogs to my daily(ish) reading list in quite some time. The blogs I'm reading are good blogs, but some of them have begun to bore me, perhaps because I'm getting to know the bloggers so well that I'm no longer finding delightful surprises when I click over.

I am not talking about Terry Teachout, a kind, classy, sensible guy who remains my gold standard for bloggers. Neither am I referring to Joe Carter, who consistently delivers the goods. Or Neil Gaiman, a bloke who could take out his trash and then write a fascinating post about it. Or The Amateur Gourmet, who daily offers up food and nonsense, with pictures. I still have lots of favorite blogs. But I have just deleted a handful of yawn-inducing blogs from my RSS reader (it's not them, it's me) and am looking for some new thrills. Maybe some of you are feeling the same way.

So. Have you read any good blogs lately? Here's your chance to sound off on the ones you've found particularly helpful, inspiring, or entertaining. Leave a comment here and list as many of your faves as you like. (Don't forget to give us the URLs so we can check them out.)

Another thing you might do is tell me what you'd like to see on this blog. I'm open to suggestions, but I'll save us all some time by mentioning two things I'm not willing to do, no matter how sweetly you ask:

Post book reviews. Sorry, but I absolutely stink at writing reviews. I either like a book or I don't. I either finish it or I don't. I can't go on for paragraphs about why I loved or hated a book. Those of you who can have my admiration.

Post pictures of cats. Not in this lifetime. I don't like cats. If that offends you enough to delete my blog from your RSS reader, so be it.

Not sick, dead, or in jail (so far)

I realize there's nothing more boring than a blog entry in which the blogger apologizes for not having time to put up an entertaining or informative post. But I didn't blog yesterday, and if I don't blog today, people will start e-mailing to see if I'm all right.

I'm all right. As of the time stamped on the bottom of this post, I am neither sick, dead, nor in jail. I'm just scrambling to meet a book deadline.

I hope to be back in my blogging chair tomorrow, writing something here that's actually worth reading. Please come back then.