winther blog

re: Why Blog If Nobody Reads It?

I don’t disagree with anything Andy wrote in https://andysblog.uk/why-blog-if-nobody-reads-it/, I think there is a notably difference to blogging and just keeping a personal diary. Must of us want at least someone to read something at some point in time. There is a reason we put things on the public web and not just in a personal drawer.

It is however easy to get caught up in the numbers game, especially here on Bear Blog which has the “like post”-feature and some basic analytics. Here it is necessary to keep focus on what is important to you. For me it is this point by Andy:

One right person. Maybe one day, someone stumbles across your words at exactly the right moment. And that changes something for them.

Of course we don’t always know when than happens, but that is just yet another reason to remind readers to reach out to the writers if you like what you read. It is many times more valuable than numbers in a statistics dashboard.

I have had my other blog on science fiction short stories for a couple of years now, and have only gotten something like 3 real comments. However, two of them have been the authors of the stories on how they appreciate that I wrote about their short story. Because short story reviews are kind of a niche and the main reason for me to start that blog, is that it is what I want to read myself. Whenever I have read a story, I would like to know what others thought of it as well. Same goes for movies, but the supply of movie reviews is not really a problem.

I can see in my statistics that I get a decent amount of visitors from Google searches on the short stories I have reviewed, and I assume some of them are other readers like me. Others are clearly homework related, because some search keywords involve “summary”, but that is okay too. One review even became a reference on Wikipedia.

I don’t just write for myself, though of course the process itself has great value too. It is mostly about putting something on the web that I would love to read myself and hopefully there are others out there that appreciate what they found on one of my blogs at some point in time.

#blogging