by John Graham

Created on: June 13, 2008

Website or Blog to promote your work?

Let's first define what these two are.

A Website is a constructed site, hopefully attractively and well designed for promoting your work: writing. At the very least it must contain good interesting writing nicely formatted without grammatical errors, acronyms or an abundance of slang. The site should be designed to attract readers who appreciate good English and exciting plots, so nothing should be loaded onto this website that doesn't meet certain standards of excellence.

A Blog, on the other hand, is an unedited daily set of contributions usually from people who are ashamed even to use their own names. Very often the contributions are angry, ungrammatical and deplorable writing. The person is trying to get his or her point across and doesn't care what people think of his or her words. That attitude shows and most blogs are deplorable scribbling.

If you were an artist where would you prefer to show your wares in a respectable gallery in which your offerings have already received a first approval or on the pavement at a street corner along with other graffiti vandals?

There is no choice in my mind. I would prefer to demonstrate my abilities among my peers than among the riff-raff.

Of course, blogs are easier since there is no adjudication of what is acceptable but I doubt that you would want to promote your work among the people who visit blogs unless of course you are writing for that audience. That would take some talent to attract them to your work. They are generally only interested in themselves.

Now we reach the crux of this short essay.

Clearly you need to promote yourself for your intended audience either the sort of discriminating reader that appreciates good writing or the blogger who simply wants drama, action and sex. Choose your audience.

If however you were to select the website method, which I prefer, sometimes the idea of producing a website of your own is daunting "I am not a technical person," you might think. Don't let that put you off. Fortunately, in this day and age you don't have to be a technical person. There are innovative sites who will provide a website for you and do all the work. You need only to select a template, choose colors and then write text or even add a photograph of the cover of your latest book. One such company is Weebly.com and a typical output can be seen at www.booksbygraham.com. The cost for the website was zero and the effort occupied me for a couple of hours.

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