Friday, September 23, 2011

In Awe of Multi-Taskers


This week is an open topic, so I thought I’d offer a few thoughts from my book tour to promote the release of Hunters.

Probably the one thing that stands out is the blogging. Many of the tour stops have been guests blogs, such as Mad Moose Mama, Lissette Manning. I’ll be the first to admit that, even though I’ve been writing for more than three decades, these blogs are kicking my ass.

This is why I’m in awe of bloggers who multi-task by writing more than one blog. I wonder how they keep their subjects and topic straight. More importantly, I wonder how they avoid bleeding, by which I mean having one blog topic spill over into another so it looks like one of those chain letters you get at election time.

I’m serious. During football season, I cover multiple college games and write separate articles about each game, usually doing write-ups of 5-6 games. Each one has to be tailored to a specific game.

This experience has nothing on blogging.

With the sports, I know specifically what to look for. For example, I can look at tonight’s game between Hampton and Bethune-Cookman and see how fumbles, interceptions and penalties decided the game.

Not so with blogging. I find myself scouring my brain for a topic for the blog. Since there’s typically nothing substantive in my head, this is a harder process than it seems. Thank goodness Roxanne Rhoads, the coordinator for this tour, has given me some topics. Other times, however, I go to the blogs themselves, see what kind of articles are being done and try to tailor my guest blog to that format.

I certainly thank these blog sites for giving me the time to hawk my wares and speak to their subscribers and fans.

And I certainly thank them for giving me the (badly needed) experience of writing for multiple blogs.

So, how about you, the reader? Do you write for multiple blogs? If so, how do keep everything straight?

7 comments:

  1. Greg, I did a book blog tour last month and was also aggravated by the blogs that let me choose any topic I wanted. Like you, I spent some time researching each blog and then tried to craft something that would appeal to each audience. It wasn't easy. I do sometimes cheat. Topics tend to repeat and if I've already written a good post, I'll tweak it a little and reuse it. I made sure none of my posts in the tour repeated, of course, but their were a few posts that I copied from my personal blog that no one seems to visit any way. ;-)

    Good luck with your tour, may it bring you lots of sales!

    ReplyDelete
  2. It is hard, Greg. They awe me, too.

    Good luck with your tour. If you want to do a post on my blog sometime, I'd be glad to have you.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks, J.D. and M. It's amazing that I can do several football and basketball game write-ups but stumble on writing more than one blog a week.

    M, drop me the blog address at my e-mail (gregory.marshall.smith@gmail.com) and I'll see what I can do.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Well, I can't use the excuse of writing for multiple blogs, yet I still have a difficult time coming up with fresh new ideas for my blog. This was just the subject I wrote posted about today. It's so tough, finding time to write a novel, tend to one's job and family and still be original in blogland.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I do, and it's just like anything else - you figure it out as you go! Blog topics aren't usually difficult for me to come up with ... now. But when I first started blogging, yeah, it was tough!

    Good luck on the blog tour!

    ReplyDelete
  6. I'm also in awe how some authors come up with fresh and new material for so many blogs!

    ReplyDelete
  7. satta king Set your focus first on the camera and then offset the subject so it is not in the center of the shot. A centered picture is usually not as interesting. An off-centered shot is likely to appear more interesting in the eyes of the viewer. play bazaar

    ReplyDelete