Ok, So I am trying to get famous, because I have a couple of books coming out soon and I want to sell lots of copies and make some money.

So the benefit from my point of view is that I might make some money out of my fame. The benefit from your point of view is that the more money I make writing the more time I can justify devoting to my writing and so the more stories and novels I will produce.

But would I go so far as to take a college class in becoming “Internet famous”?

This would be funny if it wasn’t for real!

EDIT: I was trying to embed the video in this post, but it is not working for me so here is the link.

January I started the new year with a burst of quality work, on both Justine and Terminal Singularity.
However in February we moved house and that was a little bit of an interruption. To say the least. I kept working on both novels, but I keep changing my mind about which one I should concentrate on. Justine is the more interesting, and personal, for me. But Terminal Singularity is fully plotted and 25 percent of the way through it’s first draft. So logically I should work on that. But I keep getting great ideas and character insights into the story of Justine.

I also implemented another new plan for success. Since I can’t make money at my Ideal Job, I have decided to continue the tradition of novelists having a wide variety of jobs by starting my own blog network to try to generate an income from advertising and affiliate sales. If you want to stop smoking read this blog.

I just looked at the date on the files that I have for my new novel Terminal Singularity. The latest date is 11th Dec. It is now the 29th. That is 18 days without working on my novel. OK, you might say, given the dates involved(i.e. Christmas) I might be excused for not writing while I have been busy preparing and then indulging in the pagan celebration of winter solstice( transposed a few days later, because Christians can’t get anything right).
But basically in over two weeks I have not found even 10 minutes to change even one comma or full stop in any part of the novel.
I can’t use the excuse that I have been busy writing blog posts, because I haven posted anything since the 6th.
I have had the time because I have chosen to play computer games, watch movies, etc when I could have been sitting at my computer writing.

If I can’t bring myself to write I can at least bring myself to administer my web site. I’ve just noticed that there is a new version of WordPress available to download. But, you know, I am not going to do it.

This is another form of writers block where one can distract oneself for ever doing “very important” other things (Taking out the trash, washing the car, walking the dog) and never find the time to actually write.
I will have to stop waiting to find the time to write and decide that some of those “very important” other things will just have to wait because I have made the time to write. And I will be writing and doing nothing else.

The best laid plans of mice and men…
Thursday, Friday and Saturday real life intervened in my plans for becoming mega rich by writing/blogging and I did not get any writing done. On Sunday when I did make time to write I worked on my novel and so I do not have any posts for this week written, or even half written.
I needed to work on my fiction, if I don’t make the time to work on my novel it will take me five years to finish it. And as novelists only get paid once they have finished their novels (nobody buys a half finished work of fiction) I don’t think that I can wait five years before being paid.
However as I consider my blog my day job as I am establishing myself as novelist I was worried that I have not posted anything to my blog for nearly a week.
I was going to write a post about that fact that I do not have anything to post, when I realised that posting for the sake of having something to post was simply a form of self-spamming. I do not need to fill up my blog with stupid posts about nothing of any interest. I do not read any blog that has nothing of interest in it and I would not expect anyone to read my blog if it was full of what can only be described as self-spam. Although now I find myself posting about not posting a post about nothing
Most of the expert sources I read about making money from blogging (ProBlogger, Blog Profits Blueprint) state that you need to post every day in order to keep your readers coming back and make your traffic grow. But I am not so sure if that is necessarily the case. (Note: I have been blogging for less than one year and do not make more than loose change each month, so the people who do make money might be right.)
However I can find no coloration within my own stats between the frequency of my blog posts and the amount of traffic my site gets.
Some successful bloggers/writers say the opposite (Tim Ferriss – point 2 Post less to be read more) And some say blogging is a complete waste of their time (Morris Rosenthal).

The fact is that most people who come to my blog come to read my free novels and stories and not my blog posts. Looking at my stats I find that individual chapters of my novels get 90-100 views a day, by best blog post gets 4 or 5 views. So most people are not reading my blog.
So for the most part I am pretty much relaxed about posting only once or twice per week. Quality is much better than quantity. There are enough spammers on the internet, I do not need to spam my own blog in a furtile attempt to attract readers.

Every place that I look for advice on creating a successful blog gives the same piece of advice – post every day. Every source be it the Blog Mastermind Program, or another blog such as Ten Keyboards, or even an article in a traditional magazine repeats the same advice – post every day.
It is something that I have not been doing. I am still trying to establish the discipline of writing every day. I go through periods where I do write every day, and I am always amazed at my productivity. But then I get distracted by “real life” and my discipline slips. I skip a day. I skip two days. Then I realise that I haven’t written anything for four or five days.
As a novelist I sometimes think that my blog might be yet another distraction. But I know hat writing something every day is a useful discipline, whether I am writing fiction or blog posts.
So now I am going to post every day. Hopefully I will find something useful and/or interesting to write every day. I don’t want to end spamming my own blog!

There is no such thing as bad publicity.

Or so the old showbiz adage goes. And while many bloggers might not know it we bloggers are all in the entertainment business. Even though we write posts about technology, or Web 2.0, or fishing we are trying to entertain as well as inform our readers.

Recently on the copyblogger blog Leo Babauta wrote a post encouraging bloggers to be bold. Stand out from the crowd by making bold statements was the advice given in that post. Good advice which I will try to follow.
But while we all want attention for our blogs, attention seeking just for the sake of attention is not that basis for long term success for your blog.
People have been know to take it too far. For instance I don’t think I could handle the type of publicity that Casey Serin (World’s Most Hated Blogger) gets. Casey is a self confessed fraudster facing bankruptcy with debts of over $2 Million, who has a blog about himself. I only came across Casey when Yaro Starak wrote a post about meeting him.
Casey Serin has made himself famous, or rather infamous, by blogging about himself. There are 3 or 4 blogs that exist solely to hate him. While he is obviously getting traffic, and so advertising revenue, I’m not sure that he has a formula for long term success.
He might be making a quick buck now, but I’m thinking that he will have the rest of his life to regret his actions. Long after his 15 minuets of fame are gone and his money spent he will still be hated for his actions.
So bare that in mind the next time someone tells you there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Over the years I have started and maintained several different web sites, and even some intranets for companies that I worked for.
At first I hand coded HTML using a basic text editor, then I hand coded using a programmer’s editor called EditPlus. I tried to keep my sites simple. I didn’t use must formatting. I had very basic CSS files. I am a programmer not a designer so layout and fonts and colour schemes are not my strong point.
I tried various WYSIWYG editors like FrontPage and HotMetal (though I was never very happy with them). But eventually I had to admit that I needed something more that a site with a handful of static pages. So I started my journey into the wild landscape of CMS’s. I will not list all the CMS’s that I tried, At one stage or another I have tried the top 8 on one or another of my web sites(Most of my web sites are gone by the wayside). I don’t want to start any flame wars, I found nothing wrong with any of them, they just didn’t suit me. I had come across blogs, of course, but I didn’t want software just for making a web journal.
Then I came across an article explaining how to give a WordPress a fixed front page. Hey, I thought, That sounds interesting, you might be able to make your blog look like a “normal” web site with a fixed home page.
Then I looked into WordPress a little more closely and realised they had the concept of pages. And I realised that WordPress could be used for a CMS rather than just a blog. (Abhijit Nadgouda has a recent post about the advantages of using WordPress for a simple web site CMS.)
But after I converted my site to WordPress I decided it was a bit of a waste having the ability to blog built into the software if I didn’t use these features. So I started to use the blogging features to make announcements about updates to my site.
Now that I had a blog I started to search the web for more information about blogs and I found that some people were making money by blogging, in fact that some people were making very good money by blogging.
I decided that I would like to do just that. But I didn’t know where to start. So I searched around a little bit more, and after several false starts, came across Yaro Starak’s Blog Profits Blueprint, a free ebook that outlines how to make a full time income from blogging part time. Now I am trying to follow Yaro’s advice and set my blog up as source of income to support myself in my writing career.
So am I a blogger, am I just using WordPress as a “cut down” CMS, or am I really a novelist experimenting with a new medium.
Well, who cares?
A blog by any other name is still a web site. And as a writer I am just happy that I have an outlet that allows other people to read my words.

Writers in general are famous for procrastination, we will seemingly do anything except knuckle down and actually write that Nobel prize winning novel.
And now that I have started this blog in order to showcase, market and monetize my work I am beginning to think that I have simply added another distraction to allow me not to work on my novels and stories.
Of course this is not really true, in order to be a successful write I need to brand myself, market my novels and make money. The definition of a professional writer is a person who gets paid to write.
So I have decided to turn the distraction of having to produce regular posts for my blog into motivation to write. At the very least I want to write interesting, informative and entertaining posts. Many famous authors have also worked as journalists and freelance writers in order to pay the bills. And by starting this blog I am doing the 21st century equivalent.

I am making the focus of this blog how I write, when I write, my thoughts and feelings on writing, even some hits and tips on techniques etc.
I will be concentrating on 5 main areas:

• Philosophy
  What I think and feel about certain subjects, with regard to writing in general, erotica in particular and my journey as an artist. Plus anything else from life, the universe and everything that might take my fancy.
• Writing
  Techniques of writing, what I feel about certain methods and the business of writing, how to make money from my writing.
• Blogging
  I pretty new to the world of blogging, so these posts will be about my attempts to build a successful blog, my experiences blogging and what I learn from Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind mentoring program. (Download his free Blog Profits Blueprint.)
• Reviews
  Reviews of books, web sites, etc. that I have come across, with particular emphasis on erotica.
• New Stories
  The whole point of my blog is to motivate me to produce new work on a regular basis. (We’ll see how this works out .)

Of course there may be some overlap between these areas, but as long as I am interesting and entertaining I hope my readership will grow.
I guess you could call this my “mission statement”, but I won’t because I have left the corporate world behind and will never return.

For as long as I can remember, way back before even the world wide web, never mind the blogoshpear; I always thought that I would love to be a columnist for a newspaper. That it would be a great job to write one column a week and get paid some, if not lots, of money for it. Of course there was the small problem of finding a newspaper who wanted to pay an unknown computer geek ( who can’t spell) to express his opinion within their pages.

And that is where blogs come in. Anybody can start a blog and write, mostly, about anything they want. But this leads to two other problems:
Firstly finding people who want to read what you have written.
And secondly if like me you want to make a living writing, there is that small problem of finding a way to make money. In the real world the $11.43 I made on-line from Adsense last month did not contribute significantly towards my mortgage repayment.

In an ideal world blogging would be an ideal job. Now all I have to do is find a way of moving from the real world, through the on-line world and into an ideal world.