It’s always nice to see my regular post published on a Saturday at 10am but almost as soon as it goes out into the world of the internet the first thing I think about is what shall I do next?
Well, the next step is to try and plug the post everywhere I can think of so this post goes out on Facebook, on X, on Instagram, on Threads and on Tumblr. I also add it on any relevant Facebook pages so for instance if it’s a sci-fi post I might link it to a sci-fi Facebook page or a sci-fi page on Reddit or any other relevant page. I also publish some of my posts over on Medium and again, link them back here to WordPress. Sometimes I even make a video version and share it over on my YouTube page.
Very few of these posts will work as a video but a couple that come to mind were a post about a letter to my younger self which translated well to a video except that the narration wasn’t really much good. (Must make a note; try remaking the video with a better narration). Another was a post about how to write poetry. The video version involved me just talking to the camera about the ways I write poetry. To be honest I think the video version was better although looking at it again recently I do seem to rabbit on a bit.
On social media I’m always trying to bring in more readers to my blog page and so I try to add something other than just a link to my latest post. Lately I’ve been making these short 5 second videos that can be made pretty easily on Grok or most other AI image making sites. I usually use these on X or on Instagram but recently I thought I’d upload a few to YouTube. YouTube seem to be trying to get on the bandwagon created by Instagram and TikTok of very short videos that viewers can just scroll quickly through. On YouTube they are called ‘shorts’ and I’ve found that my shorts have actually been really successful, bringing in lots of viewers who will hopefully watch these quick videos and then click on my website to actually settle down and read more.
One of my shorts, a very short AI generated video shows a young woman roaring off on a motorbike with the words ‘NEW BLOG POST OUT NOW’ inscribed on the back of her leather jacket. Currently that video has 4.7 thousand viewers and my YouTube followers have begun to increase. I still need another 60 followers in order to actually make revenue from my videos but happily things seem to be moving in the right direction. A small group of my main videos have great viewing figures but until I hit the magic number of 500 followers, I make no money at all from YouTube.
It’s only fair to say that after publishing that last video on YouTube a little box appeared which said promote this video for only £10! Ten pounds I thought? What’s ten pounds today? Two or three pints of lager in Wetherspoons? A CD album? Okay I thought, ten pounds, even a tightwad like me can live with that. Of course, that’s where the 4.7 thousand viewers came from, an advertisement. Even so, many of those watchers must have clicked onto my landing page and maybe even read a few posts. Did they go one step further and buy a copy of Timeline or Floating in Space? Well, maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. I’ll find out when a few royalties hit my bank account but until then I won’t be holding my breath. Nice to see that recently though my readership has been steadily expanding.
What I find really interesting is when a post from years ago suddenly gets a little attention. Why did that reader go for that particular post? Did he or she stumble upon it? Were they using a search engine and what were they searching for? Happily Google or Yahoo has directed them my way which is always nice to see.
The other day I was watching one of my favourite films Julie and Julia. It’s a film by Nora Ephron which is about a blogger called Julie Powell who decides she will make all 524 recipes from Julia Child’s cook book in 365 days. Julia was an American woman who learns cordon bleu cookery in France and writes a popular cookbook for American housewives. Obviously, things don’t all go smoothly for Julie the cook and blogger but she manages to get through a different recipe every day and in doing so gets some attention from the local press which boosts her blog even more and eventually enables her to become a published author.
It’s a great story in its own right but also for bloggers everywhere. Of course, they’d have a job making this website into a film unless they wanted endless shots of me, or someone playing the part of me, tapping away on my laptop writing blogs and short stories. Of course they could dramatize some of my stories. The Hollywood Meeting for instance in which a young writer goes to Hollywood to pitch one of his scripts to a producer might make a good film.
This is the point where I try to link a relevant feature film. Films about authors. That’s a tough one. There was Misery, a film based on a Stephen King book where an author is kidnapped and tortured but I don’t think I’m going to go there. Another film I remember seeing some years ago was called How to Murder Your Wife with Jack Lemmon. Jack plays Stanley Ford who authors a comic strip in a newspaper and acts out various situations which are then photographed. Jack’s character uses the photos to inspire his comic strip drawings. Look out for it if you see it on your TV schedules although it’s one of those films I haven’t seen for a long while on TV. When Stanley gets married, he takes many of his real life situations with his wife played by Virni Lisi and uses them in the comic strip. His comic strip character then decides to murder his wife but the wife, on seeing the strip, decides to walk out and people think Stanley has actually murdered her.
The comic strip art used in the film was by an artist called Mel Keefer who penned various comic strips in US newspapers and comics. That reminds me of another social media post I sometimes use below.
So in a world of short sharp TikTok and Instagram videos, can a blog post still work? Are there still people out there who want to read, who want to invest more than ten seconds on a post, who actually have an attention span, who can spend five to ten minutes reading something like this very post?
The answer is hopefully yes. There are even still people who want to buy and read books, after all, I certainly do.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 