Buy The Blank Screen: Blogging guide for writers on Amazon

Previously we’ve all faced the blank screen and we’ve filled it with our writing – now it’s time to blog and to blog right. The Blank Screen: Blogging is the writers’ guide to creating a blog, keeping it going and getting an audience. More than that: it’s how to do it all in a way that you’ll enjoy. Because you know this: if you enjoy something you’re writing, that comes through to your readers.

Buy The Blank Screen: Blogging right now on Amazon.

Look me in the eye

Let me guess. Either you keep hearing that you should be writing a blog and you’ve resisted – or you tried one and it was hell. Floundered. You haven’t looked at it in ages and anyway, blogs are dead, Twitter is where it’s at now.

Yes. Twitter is where all the storm of bloggers rushed to and are now happily playing around. Thank goodness. For ages there when blogs where the Next Big Thing, everyone had a blog whether or not they should have. Most were technically perfect with every whizzy web feature you’ve ever heard of and most you’ve never bothered to use. But what they didn’t have is the thing you do.

You’re a writer. By far, by infinitely far the majority of kitten-picture-fan bloggers are not and so, okay, we got some pictures of kittens. We just got nothing else and it was impossible to see blogs as anything but an ego trip for the writer. Certainly they weren’t for the readers.

Cue you. Whatever type of writing you do, however deeply introspective you have to get in order to write it, you are a writer and you write for audiences. That doesn’t just make you qualified to write a blog, it means you will create one that is worth reading.

The reason you keep getting told that you need a blog is that you need your audiences to connect to you but if you write one of those fatuously egotistical blogs, they’ll only come once. I want you to get audiences, I want those audiences to go through your blog to your other writing but I’m also selfish. As much as I’m thinking of you as the writer, I’m thinking of me as a reader: I want to read interesting blogs. I just happen to know that this means I want to read you.

If you’ve already got a blog that you loathed and abandoned, come read my book and you’ll not only revive it, you’ll enjoy reviving it. Honest. If you haven’t done one yet then great, we can start afresh. That does mean starting afresh with the very few technical questions about blogging: there are things you need to know but I want you to know them quickly so that we can get on with the real job and start writing.

The Blank Screen: Blogging has all that technical advice but you will learn that so quickly. It’s really much more about how to create a blog that works for you because it works for your readers. How the blog our editors and commissioners and agents want from us is a fast route to putting off your readers and making you wish you’d got an ordinary job. How exploiting that writer brain of yours is the faster route to a blog you’ll enjoy so much it will take over your writing life.

Okay, we’ll stop it before it gets that good. But only just.

Read how some of the best bloggers walk that line, how some of them have created entire new worlds for themselves with book deals and entire online communities. And read how some of the very finest bloggers write to express and to explore issues that grow them as writers.

Go get the book, okay? There’s a paperback and Kindle edition for the UK right here and the same for the USA over there.