This is me trying to hold off podcasts and TikToks from stealing all my readers.
Sure, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park look pretty cool, but in the end, there was a reason they shot them. They weren’t meant to exist in the modern world. Is that the fate of blogging? (As an aside, I think the Jurassic Park franchise of movies needs to be put down. We get it. It’s a bad idea to grow dinosaurs in your backyard. We don’t need six movies to make that point)
In 2005 when I started this blog I thought I was so cool. I thought I was the avant garde of modern expression. Now, in the lightning quick world of social media where TikTok dances go viral in seconds and podcast hosts become celebrities overnight, bloggers like us seem to be stuck in a time warp, typing away on keyboards like we’re sending telegrams. Are we the next form of social media to fall by the wayside?
Writers will write. I see thousands of us every week on Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress promoting our blogs and books. If you are one of them, is it working? If you’re a blogger, I sincerely would love to hear your perspectives on this.
I’m starting to wonder if I should do v-logs. Video blogs, like I did this one time when I had been downsized out of a job and had way too much time on my hands. Here’s an example of one of my vlogs:
So, do you think that guy would work as a podcast or video blog that was advertised by snippets in TikToks?
Unfortunately I can’t find/might have deleted a video of me doing a cartwheel. If you want to see some other cartwheel videos you can find me on TikTok as https://www.tiktok.com/@thephilfactor.
What do you think? Should I resort to this kind of chicanery to get social media attention? I’d really like to increase my blog readership and hopefully a couple nice folks might buy a book or two that I’ve written. If you’re a writer how do you shill your books? What works best for you?
Thanks for reading, watching and listening today! ~Phil
Yeah, I blog but not to sell books. Books don’t sell unless you spend money on advertising. People can read and follow blogs, Tic Toc, and Instagram all day long without once buying a book. What is the secret? The name of the game is recognition. Even 25,000 followers is not enough recognition that will sell books.
Thanks for the feedback John. Always appreciated.
I did the V-log/Podcast thing years ago. I discovered how much work they are if you’re a one man operation. Now, the market is so saturated that you would have to spend even more time making it into anything.
I’m in the “writers gonna write” camp, so once the podcasting thing start eating into my writing time…well, the writing was on the wall…