Over at Buzz, Balls & Hype, M.J. Rose has an excellent post on author blogging. Apparently, mega-publishing company Holtzbrinck (Holt, St. Martin's Press, FSG, Tor, etc.) has launched an initiative to get their authors blogging. Best of all, it will only take then 10 minutes a week, and they'll get tons of free publicity!
There's so much wrong about the whole concept, but M.J. explains it well, so I won't go into it. She does make a point, though, that I want to single out:
Blogging does NOT sell books for the average blogger in any way that justifies the time it takes.
In these days when the common wisdom is that "every author needs a blog," this is a crucial fact that doesn't get mentioned enough. There are always a few exceptions, especially people who got into the game early on. But for 90% of authors, blogging is a colossal waste of time. (Unless, of course, they simply enjoy doing it for its own purposes, in which case it's fine. If they're doing it for publicity, though, forget it.)
Publishers should be spending their time thinking of the NEXT way for authors to get publicity, not piling on the last way that hardly worked for anyone anyway. (And they should try to find ways that don't require the author spending several hours a week doing it! Ten minutes, my sweet patoot.)
Any author who launches Yet Another Blog at this point without some unique, exciting and valuable angle is just spinning their wheels.
On the other hand, you should have a MySpace account. :)
