Building an Online Presence

A lot of people have conflicting opinions about building an author presence online. There are definitely positives: more awareness of your name, it's easier to build your personal brand, you'll have a better platform for marketing, and you'll get more access to author and agent tips on queries and manuscripts. But really, does it help?

I’m not so sure all the time. Because I am an active member of the online community, I will often give a second glance to someone who mentions their writing blog or platform. I’ll click over, take a peak around, and return to read the rest of the query. However, whether your blog is good or not doesn’t really help your chances after that. I read the first ten pages of all manuscripts the same way: to see whether they’re good or not. If your writing doesn’t grab me, or I can’t connect to your story, then no matter how many followers you have, the query will still receive a rejection.

Additionally, if you’re writing YA, unless teenagers are the ones reading your blog, you’re not really building an online presence with your future market. I don’t know many teenagers (though I do know a few) that follow author and agent blogs as intensely as the authors and agents themselves. So, just because you’re popular online doesn’t necessarily determine whether you’ll be popular with your chosen readership.

The online sphere seems to be mostly created to perpetuate itself. Authors and publishers read author and publisher blogs, and create their own blogs, which in turn are read by other authors and publishers. Readers don’t really enter into the picture at all. So, if you think about it, building an online presence as a writing blog doesn’t really help anything.

Wait, wait! Don’t give up hope yet! Building an online presence is still an extremely valuable tool. By engaging in the online community you are constantly reading articles, talking to authors, and building up the tools you need to write better queries, better stories, and better books! By talking and commenting on posts online you are socializing, getting out of the quiet little writer bubble that we all (especially me) love to wall ourselves into! By building your platform, publishers, authors, and agents will be more ready to review and recommend your book to librarians, other authors, their kids, and their marketing teams!

In the end, building an online author presence won’t really help in all the direct ways that we’re expecting. It won’t physically push your query past the slush pile, or get more teenagers to drool all over your main character, but it will help you learn, grow, and become a better writer. And that, author friends, can make all the difference in the world!