9 Reasons Why Litblogs (And Blogs in General) are not a Fad

#1 People genuinely love doing it

First-off, let’s be clear about something. Fads are something that you, but you don’t exactly know why you’re doing it. All you know is that everyone else is and you don’t want to be a square, so you join in on the fun. Fads are inspired by, at worst, fear of not conforming, at best, mindless subservience.

Litblogging isn’t like that. If you talk to a litblogger, you’ll find out exactly how much he loves his blog. And you’ll probably have a hard time getting the blogger to stop talking about the blog. Blogging isn’t something that is done to be cool or trendy, it’s something that people really love to do. 

#2 Blogging, or reading blogs, is a habitual activity that you get accustomed to doing

Following up on the above reason, litblogs are something that people love to do, and like any beloved activity, it’s habitual. Litbloggers find in excess of an hour every day to write in their blogs. It’s not inconceivable that a blogger would get tired of blogging or lose interest, but it’s definitely true that that person wouldn’t quit cold turkey. It would be a decision that was arrived at over time, and that came with an entire set of reasons for why quitting was necessary.

Ditto for blog readers. They get inculcated into an entire culture and habit of reading blogs. They find times and ways o read blogs, they get attached to their favorites. They write in, discuss them. An emotional connection is established and this is not something that people just quit. 

Fads, on the other hand, are something that people casually acquire and drop at a moment’s notice. 

#3 There’s a tangible community

One of the reasons litblogs are so compelling is the community involved with litblogging. Litbloggers aren’t just putting their thoughts up in isolation—that’s what dear diary is for—they’re communicating with a vibrant community of individuals. There’s the other bloggers, people who regularly comment, even the mainstream media publications that bloggers regularly discuss and sometime discuss bloggers. Once you’ve blogged or read blogs for a while, you find yourself becoming attached to the litblog community’s members, and that attachment is something that means litblogs are going to be around for a while.

 

#4 Some bloggers and readers have already been doing it for years

Simply put, there’s a lot of bloggers and readers out there who have already withstood the test of time. If they’ve done it, then why can’t litbloggers who are in year 1 or year 2 keep it up just as long?

 

#5 Litblogs are becoming adjuncts to career advancement

Fads may be fun, but you don’t get much out of them. They’re a time-waster. Litblogs, on the other hand, are proving to be anything but. For some people liblogs have been and always will be jus for fun, but for many others this is a way to key into the publishing industry, to meet people, make friends, get assignments. It’s a place to showcase your know-how and your publications, somewhere you can point potential clients. Once a blog has proven its usefulness in getting you gainful income, or intangibles such as a foot in the door, you’re not going to quit or throw it away.

 

#6 Blogging was already part of your life before you knew it existed

Two big parts of litblogging are reading voraciously and wanting to discuss what you’ve read with other people. Chances are, if you’re into litblogs you’ve already been doing both for a long time. You’ve been reading tons of books and cracking open periodicals regularly for months, years probably. Litblogs are just a great way to put to use all this interesting information and all these interesting ideas you’ve been accumulating on your own. Once you take into account that you’d be doing all this stuff regardless of if you blogged or read blogs, then it’s not much of a leap to start blogging. All you have to do is just put your thoughts into words every now and then and link to cool stuff you’ve been reading. It doesn’t make sense that blogs would suddenly go out of style, because bloggers and readers would still be doing at least 2 of the 3 activities associated with litblogging.

 

#7 Ties between litblogs and the publishing industry and strengthening

Building on #5, the publishing industry is becoming more, not less, interested in blogs. More and more publishers are starting to reach out to blogs, and although the total amount of collaboration may be low, the publishers that do collaborate are starting to realize that they can do some interesting things with litblogs that can’t be done elsewhere. Virtual book tours anyone? How about writers writing posts and guest blogging? Shit, even James Patterson started up a book-promoting blog, blogging from the perspective of characters from his books. If Patterson, the king of mass mainstream marketing and branding, gets into the act then you know it’s getting big.

 

#8 The mainstream media isn’t responding the bloggers’ criticisms

That’s right. As much as I love the Sunday Review Thumbnails, I don’t see any editors rushing to shake things up per the bloggers’ recommendations. I don’t see newspapers suddenly giving time to small market literary writers. I don’t see essays on older books or except for special concept columns and when a glod-plated 100th anniversary edition is published by The Modern Library. I don’t see reconsiderations of and thoughts on important contemporary works from the last 10 years or so. I don’t see literary journals getting coverage except as curiosities. I don’t see meaty reviews, except whenever Philip Roth is published of that 1 review a month in the New York Review of Books. In fact, not only is the mainstream not responding to litblog criticisms, but it’s acting downright disdainful. So long as that happens, there will absolutely 100% be a need for litblogs and people to read them.

 

#9 Nothing better is coming along

You see anything on the horizon to compete with blogging? WIki is cool, but it’s already established itself as serving fundamentally different functions. Anything else coming down the pike to supplant blogs, to entice away hordes and bloggers and blog readers? Not really. If anything, technology is starting to develop around blogs; RSS readers to make it easier to browse, services to organize feeds into one easy-to-read computer language, services to display organization (such as it is) within the “galaxy” of blogs.

Comments

[Ed]

As the dedicated Tanenhaus watchdog, I'd say that #8 isn't entirely true. "Buried by the Times" was covered in last week's NYTBR (which I haven't finished the brownie watch for yet), weeks after I claimed that the Times would never cover it. Also, I have noticed specific issues with more women writers and more poetry and even specific reviewers I've mentioned as hypothetical possibilities. I suspect that Tanenhaus is listening to some degree, although hardly with the degree that one would hope.

[Robert Nagle]

Good post, though your readers already know what you're saying. Still, it's amazing how many literary folk just have no interest in this blogging thing.

Reading litblogs have caused me to buy several hundred dollars of books I would not have otherwise known about. The best thing about litblogs is that they allow good criticism to reside outside of commercial portals such as Amazon.com or powells.com . Amazon.com could treat reader comments as "proprietary content, and if that happens, at least people will have blogs to fall back upon.

There's nothing new or unusual about blogging or journal keeping. What's new is that they're free, that you can comment on other people's posts and they're easy to search for. (I had several writers whom I blogged about write me purely by googling their own name or noticing me on referrer logs).

It occurred to me by the way that I've been blogging for about 5 years now and I've maintained 10 weblogs (and participated in a few group weblogs). My first was an pseudonymous diaryland blog in 2000.

One positive development I see is the emergence of more group blogs. It's way too hard for one individual to post with enough frequency to keep people returning (although you do a pretty fine job of it). I was heartened to see that blogcritics (for which I write occasionally) is now listed as an official news service on google news. That means major traffic. These group portals are pretty tolerant about reposting the same content on one's personal blog, and that is good for writers.

The key question is: are you backing up your DB? Do you know how to convert your content into another format?

Another thing that has struck me is: editing. I for one am not so good at the proofreading thing (in a recent post I mentioned "Frank Kafka" until a friend scolded me for it). Weblogs are not a good method for delivering polished content. We need better feedback loops and workflow for posters about proofreading and grammar.

Finally, it will remain a historical curiosity to future digital archeologists why literary weblogs contained so many references to Via### and Texas h### em#.