52 books in 52 weeks: Blogging just for Writers

I set myself the goal of reading and reviewing 52 writing guides over the year. Here is book 17.

When I started blogging, the only people who I knew that blogged were writers. I wasn’t aware of any other kind of blog – or even vlog, as seems to be the rage by now.

I recently read an article that said writers who blog shouldn’t be blogging for other writers but for their readers. I didn’t really understand what that meant as my readers have always been mostly other writers. The author didn’t go on to elaborate, leaving me completely in the dark.

And so I picked up Blogging just for Writers by Frances Caballo in the hope that she might enlighten me.  But she made the exact same vague comment, and I started to feel very thick.

The book is very, very short. It took me just over 20 minutes to read it. And I have to say I didn’t learn a single thing. It failed to deliver on the reason I bought it in the first place and then didn’t tell me a thing I didn’t already know other than present me with a list of things I’d never even heard of. In fact, had I not read it to the end, I would have asked Kindle for a refund.

For a start, the book opens telling me to be as gutsy as Nora Ephron. Now, forgive me, but who on earth is or was Nora Ephron? This is like referring to a film that the reader has never seen. Then it goes on to list loads and loads of apps and add-ons to enhance your blog that I haven’t even seen.

For example (and I even just checked), not one of my blog platforms offers me “blog glue”, “disqus”, “optinskin” or even a “hello bar”. If these things are known as something else on various different blogging platforms, then we need the alternatives too.

I don’t believe I live in a bubble, and this book left me with too many things to scuttle away and research later when, really, it should have given me the information in the first place.

The prose prompts are quite good in that they offer, well, prompts to write to. But apart from that, this book was a waste of time for me.

Blogging just for Writers is only available on Kindle for £2.36 ($3.07).