What Should I Write About in my Writer’s Blog?

So you’ve got a nice website and a blog ready and waiting to be filled — what should you write?

Well, the good news and the bad news is that there’s no real limit to what you can or should write in your blog. You’re a writer — you can be as wide-ranging or as focused as you want. There are fantasy novelists who write about their pets, academics who write about their vacations, tech journalists who write about the latest books they’ve read, and so on.

There’s no reason to feel limited by your particular niche, either. A blog might be where you write your thoughts on politics, though your published work is all lyrical poetry.

Here are some rough ideas about what works well for writers:

• Write about your life: Describe your creative process, the research you’re doing, the interviews you’ve performed, the book tour you’re on, the life you lead as a writer — give your readers a nuts-and-bolts, behind-the-scenes look at what you do in your daily life as a writer.
• Write about writing: Offer advice for other writers and would-be writers to help them become better at their craft.
• Offer tips and advice in your niche: If you’re a how-to writer, post tips, tricks, and hacks your audience can use while they wait for your next column or book to come out. For example, if you write about photography, offer Photoshop tips, or how to select a good telephoto lens, or where the best places to take nature photos are in your state.
• Describe your non-writing life: Talk about things that happen to you when you’re not writing — the antics of your loved ones, your frustrations with the grocery store clerk, your volunteer activities.
• Write book or product reviews: Tell your readers about other books in your field that you recommend — or about your own reading obsessions outside of your genre. Or review the software, hardware, gadgets, cooking utensils, pens, or other things you use and love (or hate).
• Write about whatever you don’t write about professionally: If you write travel articles, write about dog breeding, or trainspotting. If you write fantasy novels, write about gardening — whatever you’re interested in that isn’t part of your writing life. (It just might become a new specialty!)
• Post work you don’t plan to sell: If you’re a novelist, post short short stories, or poems, or personal essays; if you’re a journalist, post “short take” pieces or op-eds about the news you cover.
• Post excerpts: I saved this one for last because while it seems like a natural thing to do, it has risks. Since most publishers want some sort of exclusivity, posting your work-in-progress or finished work you hope to sell might severely limit the market for your work. You’ll have to put some extra effort into convincing a publisher that there’s a solid reason to pay you for work that people can get for free from your site. Some authors have done this and been wildly successful — some have even sold complete novels they’ve posted publicly as they wrote them, but you have to decide if you have what it takes to pull that off and if you can afford to be limited.