Calendar

(Photo credits: PB Teen)

The absolute weirdest part about blogging a book is so far? I’m writing this post on December 26th, 2014. At the moment I’m writing this, just counting posts from the Marketing Series, which, from your perspective as a reader has only just started, are already scheduled through the beginning of June. I started writing it in November so that means the stuff I’m writing now won’t post for 6 months or more.

This is not an ideal situation. For starters, it reduces the effectiveness of the whole point of blogging a book, namely that my readers can give me feedback on the book while it’s in progress, because I’m too far ahead to incorporate suggestions in a timely fashion. Secondly, while I appreciate knowing I have so many posts in the can so I won’t have to miss a day of posting no matter how busy things get in the future, there’s a good chance I will finish the book and have it ready to publish before the whole thing has even posted here which also seems to defeat the purpose.

But how do I fix this situation? It seems like someone blogging a book only really has three choices if they don’t want to get too far ahead of their readers…

  • Write to your posting pace and no faster. If I’m only going to share a single post a week, then I should be focusing on only writing a single post per week and not letting myself get too far ahead.
  • Change your posting frequency. I’m only six months ahead because I’m only sharing one post from that series a week. If I changed it so they posted daily instead, I’d be only a single month ahead which is much more manageable. And it would also lead right into…
  • Let the blogged book completely take over the blog. Instead of leaving room in the schedule for breaking news, reviews, Sell Their Stuff excerpts and other content, I could just commit 100% to the series. If I wasn’t trying to post anything else, I’d really cut down my lead.

I could see any of these working and working well for certain blogs but I see at least one big problem with each of them for The Whine Seller.

  • Forcing the pace of my writing into an unnatural schedule is a terrible idea. I don’t write once a week. I write every single day. Not only would I have to intentionally force myself to work slower, it would make it much harder to continue my train of thought from writing session to writing session if I’m letting a full week elapse in between.
  • Switching to daily posting schedule leaves me no flexibility. My search for a good queue plugin continues and, in the meantime, I do these series by scheduling everything in advance (though I do have a nice plugin for that at least). I’ve a nice posting calendar plugin that lets me reschedule things as needed but it’s difficult to do in bulk. If something timely happens and I want to preempt the series for a news or review post, there’s no easy way to do that. Not to mention that going from a 2 to 3 times a week blog to a daily one is no small change. How would readers feel about the sudden barrage of posts? And what happens when the series is over and I go back to the old schedule?
  • This isn’t a blog about just one thing. The Whine Seller isn’t only a blog about marketing, Selling Assistance or eBay. It’s a multi-topic blog and I know it’s the variety that brings people in. If this was a single topic blog and I was blogging a book about that single topic, it would be no big deal to just commit 100% to a series until it was finished. But doing that would mean abandoning the multi-topic focus of the site and I’m already limiting things enough devoting two posting days out of the week to series. I just don’t like the idea.

I don’t know if there is a good solution. For now, I’m thinking of keeping Selling Assistant posts confined to Fridays until I’ve blogged all of Sell Their Stuff, the Marketing Series on Wednesdays and then leave Mondays for other posts like reviews and breaking news. But, since my stockpile is so large right now, I could occasionally post something from one of those two series on Mondays as well if I don’t have anything specific to write about on any given week. And if things get really crazy, I could always add a post on Sundays as well so I don’t end up over a year head of myself.

What do you think? What do you think would be the best way to take advantage of the process of blogging a book without letting your blog suffer because of it? What would your preference be as a reader? How about as a writer?