Thoughts on Blogging

I guess this post is going to cover a few things, just in case anyone is interested. How the blogging is going, what my plans are for the future, and a shout-out and thanks to the people who are helping and supporting me.

So, 16 days into the blog experiment, and how is it going?

I think it’s going well. I get at least a few reads every day, some of whom are people I don’t know in real life. I’ve received a few nice comments. A few people are following me, which is pretty cool. My numbers have been steadily increasing. My busiest day had slightly over 40 reads. I get a lot of traffic from leaving comments on Terribleminds, and a lot through Facebook, which is mostly my family. I am pleased with the results so far.

I’ve done a little bit of work on the blog, reorganizing it and making it look a little cleaner. The home page now only displays summaries of my posts, and visitors need to click “read more” to see the actual post. I tweaked a few other things as well.

My plan for the future is to just continue posting the things that I write. I think I will only post longer pieces on Wattpad, and I will put a summary and a link here. Shorter things, like the flash fiction pieces, will be posted here in their entirety. I hope that I will continue to grow my reader base by doing a few things: building relationships with other bloggers, posting more (and hopefully better) pieces, and slowly but surely updating the site to make it look much better than it currently does

One of my near future goals is to upload my pieces on Amazon.com as ebooks. I will probably wait until I have more people reliably reading my stuff, and then I will try to start earning some money. I plan on probably bundling multiple short stories together and selling for $2.99. Longer pieces, when I ever get to writing them, will be sold individually for a price TBD. I think the idea will be something like, “here is my stuff, you can read it for free online, and if you like it won’t you please go to Amazon and pay $3 to support a starving artist?” I will probably, in the further future, implement a system where pieces will only be posted for a few weeks, after which they will only be available through Amazon.

I also plan on growing my readership – and even earning some money – by finding websites that pay for articles, like the Escapist. I am going to query them soon, and hopefully they will buy a piece from me. The Escapist has a very wide reader base, so posting an article there with a link to my blog on the bottom would direct a lot of traffic here. Other websites buy/post articles, I just need to find some. That’s coming.

Things have been going really well so far, although I haven’t been able to spend as much time working on writing as I want to. I’ve got several ideas knocking around, I just don’t have the spare time. I’m in the middle of my senior semester of college, and in a month I am going to have a baby son, so I know it’s just going to get harder. However, I really enjoy doing this and I fully intend to keep it going.

In the vein, I want to give a quick shout out to the people who have been really helpful and supportive of me. James Swinney has been lending me some of his street cred on Wattpad, which has helped me find readers and even a few fans. Joe Newhouse is helping me with the management of the website, which I appreciate – and in return I get to write dialogue for a screen play. My wife, Jaclyn, has been reading everything that I write, and she tells me that she likes it. Adam Swinney, my older brother, has also been reading my blog and leaving encouraging comments, and my sister-in-law Emily has been reading too, and shared a link on FB. So thank you all, I really appreciate your help, and many thanks to everyone else who has been checking this stuff out. I hope it’s enjoyable, or at least interesting. But even if it’s not, I’m gonna keep on going.