July 19, 2005
I interviewed Libby Fischer Hellmann today. She's a mystery novelist and a very nice lady and it was a good, chatty interview. In fact, it was so chatty I'm inclined to call it a conversation rather than an interview. She's that kind of person. Very approachable.

Anyway, she asked me what I thought about all these writers blogging. (Yes, interesting turnaround--the interviewee asking more questions of the interviewer than other way around.) It was a question in the context of marketing and selling books, and I had to admit that I didn't have much of an answer. One of the reasons I decided to start a blog was to create some sort of web presence for my fiction, as well as my nonfiction. So do I have an Internet presence now? Yeah, I guess, at least as much as I did before with my website and a little bit more.

The reason question, from a writing/marketing perspective is, has anybody who has read my blog then gone somewhere and bought a copy of one of my books?

I don't know. From my perspective, I never have, at least not based on a blog. Libby commented that blogs seemed to be a lot of writing energy expended. I don't think they are, but I do accept the fact that there is only so much writing time and energy to go around and a blog is probably a questionable way to expend it. Yet here I am, blogging away.

Any comments? Any readers here charged to amazon.com and ordered a copy of Dirty Deeds or Catfish Guru? Anybody who's tripped across some other author's website felt inspired to buy their books based on their blog? Come on. 'fess up.

Best,
Mark Terry