As a blogger, it’s easy to feel like you should always be striving for more.
More time spent at the computer, more time online, more writing, more social media, more posts, more readers, more, more, more.
It can become a pretty high pressure cycle if you let it.
One area that always makes me feel a bit inferior is the e-book. A lot of bloggers create e-books as a way to hook their audience into subscribing for email updates, or even as a revenue stream. It’s become fairly standard: write a blog, write an e-book. If you want to be taken seriously, or blog professionally, you should be thinking of ways to make this work.
Whenever I see another blogger talking about their e-book plans I feel a pang – should I be trying to write one? Am I missing an opportunity?
But it’s not something I’ve ever seriously considered.
For a while, I had plans to self-publish my first novel. While technically an e-book, publishing a novel online is a different beast and isn’t so heavily tied in to your blog.
But the editing required became a little much and I chose to focus on a new manuscript instead. Maybe one day I’ll circle back to self-publishing, but for now it’s not one of my priorities.
For me, blogging and writing are not the same thing. When I talk about writing, I mean writing prose, writing fiction. That’s not to presume one type of writing is worth more than another or is harder to master, but they do involve different processes and skills.
I spend a lot of my time blogging, but far less working on my novel, although I would always state that the latter is my priority. That means that any extra work should go into my writing.
Perhaps one day I’ll write an e-book – if I feel I have the right content. I wouldn’t want to repackage old blog posts; I’d want to write all new, useful content, which is a big challenge.
But I’d rather spend that time and effort writing a novel. Because as much as I love blogging, writing is where my heart is and it’s where my focus for the future should lie. Writing an e-book would only be a distraction.