Our own Dianne Pearce (me) has a new post up at Authors Electric, and it begins with an important literary question:
Which author, living or dead, would you most want to get with? (A topic that deserves serious, serious daydreaming.)
The weirdo answer from Dianne (again, me) is Tom Robbins. Not because of what he looked like, but because of what his writing revealed about the strange, funny mind behind it. From there, Dianne (still me) wanders into attraction, humor, imagination, and the peculiar intimacy of reading someone else’s words.
I (Dianne, obviously) encourage you to go read it.
But while we’re (actually me, or rather, I, I am) sending you over there, there’s another reason writers should have Authors Electric on their radar.
Write somewhere that isn’t yours already!
Get off your duff, friends. Authors Electric accepts guest posts, and opportunities like that are worth looking for.
If you’re an author, it’s easy to spend all your blogging energy writing for your own website. That’s useful, but the people visiting your website are generally people who have already found you. A guest post puts your name and your writing somewhere else, in front of someone else’s readers.
And you don’t necessarily need to write about your book. In fact, please don’t turn every guest post into an advertisement for your book. And, on your own blog, don’t do that either. And certainly don’t blog on one blog solely about going to read something on another blog. That’s something we, here at OSP (well, rather I, me, actually; the rest of OSP has no idea what I’m writing here and will probably refuse to be held accountable for it), would never do. (Go read my post!)
Write something funny. Write about the books you love. Write about research that sent you down an unexpected rabbit hole. Write about some peculiar part of the writing life. Write something that makes a reader think, I like this person. What else have they written? People think that about me all the time (I am assured by my caretakers, who wish to keep me relatively compliant and still).
That’s the point.
Guest posting can give you another byline to share, another place for readers to encounter you, another link leading back to your work, and, perhaps most importantly, a chance to introduce yourself without standing on a chair yelling BUY MY BOOK (but seriously, people, buy our books. Well, mine’s not out yet, but buy the other books from OSP. Go ahead. Make a poet smile, and put down the bread knife. God, poets eat a lot of bread!).
glorious poppy seeds
glorious poppy seeds
delicious and replete
I love your taste
so very much
I happily pick you
from my teeth
Authors Electric is one place to consider. There are others. Look at blogs and publications connected to your genre, your subject matter, your profession, your interests, or the subjects you research for your books. See whether they accept guest contributions. Read what they publish before you pitch them. (Or just pitch wildly, like me in AA softball in 1970-something; you don’t need to know the date. Shut up about the years gone by! I pitched so wildly they [the coach, my own father] stuck me on second base where I could chomp on a huge wad of Bazooka Joe, blowing bubbles so large they hid my face, and not do too much damage to our losing streak. Wait, what are we discussing here?)
EXCLUSIVE!
Actual for real 100% photo of me in little league, wearing my official AA shirt and standing on second base with my beloved glove in my hand, age 9. People never could steal second from me because I was standing on it, and I could not see them coming, because of the gum.
Then come up with something their readers (which is to say readers who read their website/blog) might actually enjoy. Why would they let you post for them? Certainly because you are a serious author taking things seriously and not at all running around the yard barefoot and dangerously late for work. (By the way, forget the job. Poetry is lucrative!)
And how do you know what kinds of posts their gossamer readers like to read? I don’t know. Why you asking me? (Oh, um, read their blog and see what they write about? That might help.)
A quick scan of Authors Electric tells you that its readers are people who like books, writing, writers, publishing, and the odd places a writer’s mind wanders when nobody has stopped it in time. Posts range from writing and publishing to books and reading, author events, technology, literary memories, travel, personal stories, and whatever else can be dragged back, however tenuously, to a life lived among words. They’re personal, conversational, sometimes funny, sometimes serious, and not particularly interested in behaving like somebody’s content-marketing strategy. They seem to be genuinely nice people (as opposed to faking being nice), and that tracks because they’re mostly in Australia and the UK. I cast no stereotypes or aspersions on one side of the pond, the bog, the gulf of unreachable miscommunication, or the other. If you suggest that I am or that I do, or that I should, I will deny it with the vigor of a Dickens character.
They are also intentionally very light on salty words, unlike me and my prose, because I like every damn thing with extra freaking salt.
Why would anyone want a guest post from you? Your mother may have the answer. She thinks you’re great. But also because posting on a regular basis is really quite exhausting, and you can give another author access to another set of readers while giving the blog’s regular writers a bit of a break. Many hands make light work and all that. (Man, I’m tired. I wish someone else would write this and I could just go empty the percolator!)
And if you think you might like to guest post here, absolutely not, you shameless opportunist! Wait… No. I mean, hey, we might like that. Post a response to this post if you’re interested and tell us how to reach out and touch you (in a platonic way, of course).
And if you’d like to see one example of exactly that, go find out why that lunatic Dianne Pearce (moi, bien sûr) had such a deep (and purely, very pure) professional affection for author Robbins that she would, apparently, have overlooked quite a lot, including the possibility of belly-button fungus.
I mean, it’s Tom Robbins we’re (me, I’m) obsessed with, not John Cheever.
Read “Which Author Do You Most Want to Get With?” at Authors Electric. Go ahead. You know you want to (well, actually, you may not want to, but I would certainly like you to, so consider yourself cajoled)!
