WordPress and Censorship.

I have been on WordPress, and have blogged here ever since Blogger annoyed me enough to abandon my Blogger blog to start one on WordPress. 

I am a believer in free speech. Not because I want to swear at people— I DO swear, in my own barnyard, usually when I step in some ’S’ or see an animal F-ing with the wrong female. But I try to talk civilized around regular people. Nor because I want to talk about S-E-X in front of the public, including other people’s children. I have as dirty a mind as anyone, but honestly, why should I share? Everyone interested probably has a dirty mind of his own, why should I degrade myself to entertain others? You should all think up your OWN impure thoughts.

But we live in a world where anything can be worthy of censorship. Last election cycle in the US, asking the wrong things about the election results made the Facebook gods mad. Lately I got a link taken down because it gave explicit instructions on how to make healthy home-made baby formula. Oh, the horror!

I heard from a writer friend, Jon Del Arroz, about a woman who wrote a book with a ‘black’ main character. This woman, apparently, identifies as ‘white.’ So she got cancelled. 

When you can be censored for anything and everything even the possible color of your skin, real writers stand up for freedom. But, not so loud. We don’t want to be cancelled prematurely if we can help it.

I have some friends who use Substack, including authors Declan Finn and Rachel Nichols. When I went to the Substack site, I was afraid they might be kind of ‘woke,’ but I haven’t heard of anyone getting censored like they are on Facebook or Twitter.

I have never had a post taken down on WordPress. Once, when I wrote a post examining whether Mohammed was a false prophet, WordPress got a complaint which they passed on to me, suggesting I might like to modify my post. I did nothing, they did nothing.

But I don’t trust that will be true forever. After all, Twitter was once free enough that a certain US president had an account there. 

My new Substack newsletter, at the moment, is taking the place of my MailChimp newsletter which I didn’t use often enough. You can subscribe to my newsletter, get the posts there in your email inbox, and read or delete them at your leisure. 

I hope you will at least take a look at my Substack newsletter— it’s at  https://nissaannakindt.substack.com . And think about your own internet presence. Are you at the mercy of one big ‘woke’ corporation? If you are, no matter how compliant you are, you can be cancelled at any moment, for reasons that may not make sense, if you are even given a reason. Expand your reach a little. Be in more places than one. Until you get world famous, the censors won’t trouble to ban you everywhere at once. Dance between the raindrops. It’s a way to be a little more free.

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Follow me on Gab, a free-speech Facebook/Twitter alternative:  https://gab.com/nissalovescats

Switching from Scrivener to Evernote

In happier, less poverty stricken days I was a Scrivener user. I bought the Scrivener version for Windows, and when I bought a second-hand Mac, I bought the Mac version as well. I liked it, though I also liked the ‘YWriter’ I had used before I got Scrivener.

Then came last fall. My internet service for my computer was through Dishnet, and I didn’t have the money to pay the bill, so they cut me off, so I really couldn’t pay the bill because I paid online.

My Scrivener could not back up to Dropbox, so everything I wrote was subject to being lost forever in the event of computer death.

My only internet access was through the limited amount of data I had monthly on my cell phone.

I had downloaded Evernote to my computer and cell phone before. There were things I didn’t like about Evernote. I once composed a blog post on Evernote, and in the process of cutting and pasting it to WordPress there was a glitch and the whole blog post was lost. I had to write it again from memory.

But in this new age of universal censorship, I wasn’t happy about trusting my writing to WordPress alone. I wanted a backup copy. So, Evernote for cell phone.

The nice thing about Evernote is that there are versions for different devices, plus an online version that you can use on any computer as long as you remember your log in information.

Also, I can write into Evernote on my cell phone even when data is turned off. I presume it will just sync with the other versions when I get connected.

I created notebooks for blogging and writing, and I make tags so that each blog post or story part can be found.

It’s hard to type into a cell phone when you are used to using a keyboard, so I spent 12 dollars on a keyboard that links to my cell phone. I am typing with that keyboard right now. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it works.

The monthly data on my cell plan is a limit. I want to go to the next most expensive cell plan which has unlimited data, but I couldn’t find out how to do that on my cell phone. I may have to use computers at the public library to do that— if they don’t discriminate against unmasked people.

For writing, I’m planning to post short stories on Wattpad. Wattpad is not a great community— I’ve been told that ‘Christian fiction’ is biased because it excludes Muslims— but I know some real writers there like Karina Fabian.

I can also use Canva from my cell phone, so my Wattpad stories will have covers, although those covers will suck.

Evernote is not as good a writing tool as Scrivener. Scrivener can even compile your work into an ebook file that Smashwords and Kindle will accept. But Evernote is what I have to work with right now.

The hard part is transcribing things from my Scrivener files to Evernote. I have to type these things into Evernote word for word. I keep thinking of ways to get my internet reactivated to spare me this chore. But I have to tough it out and type, type, type.

What about you? Have you used Evernote? What did you think of it? Have you had to make any adjustments to your writing practice because of lack of money? How have you powered on with your writing in spite of troubles?

The ‘Cult’ of Imposing Writing Rules on Others, IWSG

One thing insecure writers so often do is get on a mad search for absolute writing rules and then proceed to impose those rules on other insecure writers— whether asked for feedback or not.

This is a post in the Insecure Writers’ Support Group blog hop. Learn more at: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html

Some people support the rule about ‘no clichés’ by condemning every actual fantasy element in a fantasy novel as ‘cliché.’ No dragons, no elves, no vampires, no magic rings… no readers, because fantasy novel readers like books with fantasy elements in them, even though they have seen these things before. 

Some people like to complain about ‘head-hopping,’ or shifting the point-of-view during the scene. It IS an amateur move to shift point-of-view accidentally or in a confusing way. But author Stephen King wrote a scene where the reader starts off in the head of a bad guy on a shooting spree, shifts to a frightened observer who is the next to get shot dead, and then moves back to the point-of-view of the shooter. Does this make Stephen King an amateur hack-writer who will never be published? No, it makes him a skilled writer who is too experienced to bow to a lot of absolute amateur-writer rules.

Our need for rules dates back to our very early days of being able to read or write. When teacher admonished us that the word ‘cats’ must not be spelled ‘ka777z,’ it was wise of us to obey that rule if we wanted others to be able to read our childish little attempts at writing sentences. 

But we kept on learning more and more, and I hope we will all keep on learning more about writing until we die. There are very few absolute rules other than the ‘traffic signals’ of correct spelling, grammar and punctuation that make other people able to make sense of our work. Imagine if Jeff Lindsay had gone to a bunch of rule-oriented writers and explained his idea for the Dexter novels. A serial killer who’s a blood spatter analyst and the ‘hero’ of the series? You can’t do that! Lead characters need to be— at least more moral than someone that gets a thrill out of making other people dead. But Lindsay did pretty well with the Dexter thing after all.

The point I have to make is we have to develop our writing confidence enough to ignore the people who want to impose various rules on our work. If we are writing ‘OK-enough’ fiction and not groupthinking it to death through critique groups, we can ignore alleged writing rules. And if our writing skills have a long way to go, no amount of slavish rule-obeying will save us. (Hint— if you fear your writing is ‘not good enough,’ read more books. Write more novels and short stories. Your skills will improve.)

“Why is my writing broken?”

A lot of writers out there are desperately searching for a critique group, or beta readers, or even a ‘content editor’ to hire, to get some feedback on their work. Many go so far as to post their writing or writing ideas on an internet group and then get frantic when random strangers on the internet are too critical, which means ‘my writing sucks,’ or not critical enough, which means ‘my writing sucks so much that people feel sorry for me.’

This is a post in the Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog hop. To connect with other Insecure Writers, follow this link: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html

What we are looking for in these cases is validation, and our search for validation is usually based on ideas like this: My writing is broken. My writing is broken because I am broken, and so therefore I can never fix my own work myself. Other people— any other people, even strangers on the internet— are not broken so that any thing they say about my work is valid and any criticism they make must trigger yet another rewrite. Because I’m broken and they are not.

Why oh why do so many of us think like that? Well, think back to the days when you were first learning to read/write and were writing down words and phrases for the first time. When you showed your first written sentences to a grownup, that grownup often couldn’t make out what you meant to say. Perhaps because the word ‘cat’ is spelled with fewer sevens than you used. Or some of your letters looked more like other letters than the ones intended. Only a grownup could show you which things needed to be fixed at that baby stage of your learning. 

But now, you are not a little kid any more. You probably can spell many words correctly, or you know how to use a dictionary and spell-check to fix mistakes. You can either write legibly or you use a computer to write so no one needs to know how vile your handwriting is. But inside you is still that tiny learning kid that expects his work to be wrong, and broken, and in need of grown-up fixing. 

Here is the reality— your writing is not ‘broken’ and you are not ‘broken.’ You know things and have skills you didn’t formerly have. And you can learn new stuff any time. If you think your characters are weak, you can read a good book on writing better characters. If you make a lot of typing errors, you can get a typing program and practice every day. 

Other people are not better than you at everything. Just because some near-stranger in your critique group says you can’t write a book about a serial killer who solves crimes because he likes to murder other serial killers doesn’t mean you can’t write that. Just because someone says ‘Amanda’ is a stupid name for a character doesn’t mean you have to change it to Agnes. Believe in your own writing ideas more than you believe in that of others. Because they can’t see inside your head and write your story for you, any more than you can see into another writer’s head.

Also, when you learn for yourself to correct flaws in your work, you learn to see the difference between a real flaw and just something that some random person didn’t like. Spelling ‘cat’ as ‘ka777’ is a real flaw (except perhaps in avant-garde poetry,) making your starship captain a talking cat is more a matter of taste. 

I think sometimes that the main difference between the ‘real’ writers and the eternal beginners is not in skill or talent, but merely in the fact that ‘real’ writers believe in themselves and their work— enough, at least, to keep going and to submit or publish their works. I have read big whoppers of mistakes in early works of big-name writers— a writer who created a metal-poor world in which the hay was still kept in hay bales, implying the existence of hay balers which require lots of metal to make. Or the very young writer who implied that a 30-year-old character was old and decrepit. These mistakes made it into print, and these writers made a living in writing anyway. 

So don’t fear mistakes so much you feel ‘broken!’ Your ‘broken’ writing may attract readers that love your work and want more.

Finding Your Genres #IWSG

It’s not enough to aspire to be a real writer— you have to be a writer OF something. That’s where genres come in.

A genre is a book-selling category. If you go into a real-world bookstore, there may be a section of science fiction and fantasy, a section of mysteries, a section of romance. In a big bookstore there may even be a bit of literary fiction around somewhere. 

Genres are the way most of us find stuff to read. We learn that certain genres reliably give us a good reading experience and other genres do not. We pick up Westerns or mysteries or thrillers or military SF or gothic romance or whatever other kind of book we have learned delivers the kind of story we want.

When you are becoming a writer, part of the job is developing a self-identity as a writer. And writers are known by the genres they work in— there are romance writers and horror writers and Western writers and science fiction writers. 

Of course there are writers who write in multiple genres, or who write a book in one genre but then write in a different genre— as in the case of Louis L’Amour, whose first published book was poetry and wrote many many Western novels, which are still in print today. 

But your writer-identity ought to have one or more genres connected to it. It’s not a limiting thing— you are still free to write and publish what you like— but it helps you think of which playing-field you will likely be working in. But how do you figure out what genre(s) to pick?

What Genres do you Read?

When you are reading for your own pleasure, what genres are you most likely to pick? Don’t be ashamed of what you like— even if your English prof told you that intelligent people only read literary fiction, that doesn’t mean you should feel bad for reading things you actually enjoy. Learning to be a good writer— of ANY genre— means a lot of reading since if you are a Regency romance writer you need to learn what current writers are doing IN THAT GENRE. It’s easier to do that reading if you don’t hate the genre!

What Genres do you get ideas in?

Some well-known writers enjoy READING in certain genres, but they don’t really THINK in that genre. They may read every science fiction novel that comes out, but their brains don’t come up with valid science-fiction story ideas. Or they may love historical fiction but not be able to do the massive amount of research involved. (I might want to set a story in the Roman empire but I don’t speak Latin well, and don’t have access to a library that would have the books I’d need for research or the money to buy a library’s worth of books about Roman history, so any mystery novel ideas I have where the Emperor Claudius solves crimes will have to remain unwritten.)

What Genres currently sell well?

This is where many aspiring writers go astray. They think the genre they love doesn’t sell or is too competitive so they randomly pick a genre that’s currently ‘hot.’ But if you think Amish romance or Dystopian YA is utter dreck, you will likely not be able to write in that genre in a way that fans of that genre will appreciate. 

But there is room for writing in popular genres in the world of writing. The top Gothic romance authors, when the genre tanked, called their books Romantic Suspense and kept on writing. Fantasy writers might try writing some ‘paranormal romance’ if that category is selling. Science fiction writers might try a ‘dystopian YA’ novel, especially of some of their science fiction novels have been described under that term. 

Even when you are a mere unpublished— not even indie published— writer, picking your genre(s,) reading in your genre(s,) and thinking of yourself as a future writer in those genre(s) is a good step towards becoming a writer for real. And that’s always a good thing.

What genres do you read? Get ideas in? Write? Publish? Are there other genres you might like to try someday? Share about it in a comment!

Yours in genre-identity,

Nissa Annakindt

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This was a post in the Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog hop: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html

Need to know more about book marketing? Read ‘How to Market a Book’ by Joanna Penn. (Not my book, not a paid ad. Just a recommendation.)

Bashing the Big Names: An Author-Blogger Trap

One of the difficulties we face as author bloggers is figuring out what to blog. Writing about our current WIP may sap our writing energy and may put off readers as they learn about a book they can’t buy yet (and may never be able to buy if the writing project dead-ends.)

And self-promos to sell your books in print, and promoting the books of your relatively-unknown writer friends may make your blog feel too commercial to your readers. 

One answer is to blog about the big names in your genre or subgenre. This will attract the kind of reader who is already a fan of something in your genre and who might become interested in YOUR writing. 

Being a glowing fan of a big writer in your genre might be a nice move, at least unless the big writer turns out to be Hitler or Marion Zimmer Bradley. But being a detractor of a big name in your genre can be a problem.

I consider Orson Scott Card to be a big name writer in the kind of fiction I want to be writing. I actually like OSC and think he writes better than I do. But if I had the disdain for him that I have for some well-known writers, I might not mention it on this blog, and for a good reason.

When a little or new writer criticizes a big name, the readers tend to wonder if the little/new writer is just jealous. Imagine a writer of Christian fantasies for kids who accused J. K. Rowling of promoting ‘witchcraft’ to kids. The presumption of envy would poison any chance of readers actually believing the Christian writer had a point. (As a Christian writer who has experienced being a neopagan and a Wiccan, I would like to point out that I personally do not believe that J. K. Rowling did in fact promote Wicca to kids. Nor do I believe that Rowling’s Christian critics were insincere or motivated by jealousy of her success.)

Now, I am not the kind of person who tends towards feeling nothing but awe and praise for a big name writer. The last time I felt like that about about a writer, it was Marion Zimmer Bradley and THAT did not turn out well. (To learn about the MZB problem, get the book The Last Closet by Moira Greyland, MZB’s daughter and abuse victim.)

The answer may be to keep the criticism small and specific, and mention the good things about the writer as well. Writer X doesn’t write female characters that I find believable, but he tells an exciting story that keeps me reading til all hours. Writer Y had an explicit sex scene in a later book of a series that had previously been pretty clean, but I find her books endlessly re-readable, even the ‘naughty’ one.

The key is to turn your blog into the blog of a person well-read in your genre. OK, I myself will never be that. I’m often content to read a book in one of my favorite genres that’s a couple of decades old rather than face a new author that may be annoyingly politically correct and a poor story-teller to boot. But that’s just me. I’m sure YOU can do better.

Yours in bloggery and/or author-bloggery,

Nissa Annakindt

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Join me on MeWe: https://mewe.com/i/nissaannakindt

COULD YOU HELP? As a low-income person on disability, I’m facing some bill problems right now. If only a few people could buy my ebook, perhaps review it, perhaps share about it on social media, that would be a big help to me right now.

‘Getting More Blog Traffic: Steps Towards a Happier Blogging Life’  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086H4FQ4M

Blogging is Essential to your Author Platform! #IWSG

Let’s take a break from being insecure about ourselves as writers, and start being insecure about our Author Platform! Just for a change of pace. (This is a post in the Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog hop: Sign up here: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html) 

What is your author platform, anyway? A ‘platform’ is like the soapboxes cranks and crackpots used to stand on in big city parks while they lectured on their topic to the entertainment of the crowd. The soapbox helped the crackpot be seen over the heads of his (hoped-for) crowd of listeners.

An author platform today consists of the things that make the author visible. Let’s take the example of television personality and author Bill O’Reilly. When he had his own show on the Fox News Network, he was allowed to plug his current book at the end of his evening broadcast. He also had a web site for which he sold memberships in exchange for exclusive content— a web site he was also allowed to plug on his television show. And so his books sold well— because they were well publicized, and because they were good enough that readers were willing to buy the next O’Reilly book. And when O’Reilly lost his Fox TV show, he had his web site to fall back on, so I would imagine any books he writes continue to sell well.

The sad fact is, though, that none of US is going to be invited to host a TV show on a nationwide channel so we can have a good platform for our books. We have to build our author platform ourselves, plank by plank. And a blog is a key to having a good author platform.

Why? I have heard people say that they ‘blog’ on Twitter or a Facebook author page. Those social media may be part of an author platform— until Twitter or Facebook suspend or shadowban you— but they can’t fully replace a blog, for these reasons.

1. Authors are expected to have websites, and blogs qualify. You can use ‘pages’ on your author blog to have all the things that an expensive web designer would put into a static author website for you. And you can do it yourself, and for free on Blogger or WordPress . com. 

2. Tweets are fleeting, but blog posts are forever. A tweet or a Facebook page post has a ‘shelf life’ of a few hours or a few minutes. A blog post may be drawing in new readers for years. That’s making the most of your writing time!

3. Blogs can turn into books. Particularly in the non-fiction realm, a good blog can lead to a book contract. People have actually been asked to turn their popular blogs into books! Traditionally-published books! And even if no one asks you to do that, you can take a bunch of posts on a topic, ‘fix’ and redraft them into good shape and add new material, and publish or self-publish them as a book. (You could also just throw a batch of random old blog posts together as a book, but it might receive worse reviews because of being ‘episodic’ in nature.)

4. Removed blogs can be put back up. Now, I don’t know anyone who has had his blog taken down by Blogger or WordPress, while I know quite a few people who have had their Facebook or Twitter accounts censored, suspended or removed. But anyone who does as I do and composes blog posts on software such as Scrivener or Evernote can respond to losing a blog by putting the posts back up somewhere else. Does anyone bother to do that with their tweets or FB posts? If they did, would putting the tweets back up somewhere even be worth doing? 

You may feel that your own personal blog is a failure in adding anything to your author platform. But likely your blog is doing better than you think. I recently discovered I had a couple of readers that follow this blog by email! I never thought my blog was attracting readers as loyal as that. Also, your blog can become better over time. You can read blogging advice, as from Barb Drozdowich’s Blogging for Authors or from blogs such as Problogger, and make your blog better over time.

Wishing you happy blogging,

Nissa Annakindt

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Want tips to improve an author blog? Join my FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/310331253293318/

My new book: Getting More Blog Traffic: Steps Towards a Happier Blogging Life  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086H4FQ4M

Short Posts, Long Posts & Your Blog

When you are keeping your blogging schedule, there are two main types of blog posts you will be composing. One is the briefer and lighter short post. The other is the more comprehensive long post. Most of your posts will be short posts. Most of your posts that go evergreen and keep pulling in new readers over time will be long posts.

The short post is may be just past the minimum of 300 words. It covers a narrower topic. It can be more personal, fun, or frivolous. One way to find topics for such a post is to look at other blogs in your niche. Write down five topics you have seen other blogs cover lightly or briefly. For each topic, think of a way that you could do that topic differently. Or perhaps you may think of away to do a slightly different topic in a similar way.

Once you have a list of five or more topics, pick the one that you feel like writing right now, today. Start a new text in your writing software and start writing. If you need to, before you begin the writing process, make a short list of the topics you will cover, or important points you will make. This may give you the idea to turn your topic into a list post.

The long post is where you will have evergreen posts on your blog. Unlike Twitter, where a tweet will vanish from sight within minutes, your long posts may be drawing new readers in for years. The long post can cover a topic more broadly than a short post can, but it still needs to be narrowed down. You cannot write about life, the universe and everything in one blog post. Not without making it so long that its gravity will create a black hole.

A long post may be far past the 300 to 500 words you will find a short post. However, when you start getting up towards 1000 words, slow down. If a post is too long, most readers will not finish it. Is there a way you can get to the point of this post more quickly? Perhaps a bulleted list would you help organize your post if you tend to ramble like I do.

This post is a short post, and it is coming to an end. I hope it will help you compose the two kinds of blog posts that your blog will need period

Happy blogging,

Nissa Annakindt

This blog post was dictated using the dictation feature that came with my (older) Mac.

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What’s Your Blogging Brand?

What is a blogging brand? I picture it like this: first, you hot up the branding irons. Then, you roust the cowboys from the bunkhouse and set them to rounding up the bloggers. When the bloggers are all lassoed and hog-tied, you apply the red-hot branding irons to bare blogger butts.

OK, it’s not like that exactly. Think of your blogging brand is what you deliver to your readers— whether that is humor, political rants, encouragement, cute cat pictures. Your blog niche relates to your brand. If you decide that your blog niche is hard-hitting political commentary and you post nothing but pictures of your cute kitten (or puppy, snake or murder hornets,) you are not putting out a political commentary brand, but you are delivering cute pet pictures (unless your pets are murder hornets.)

Your blog’s readers come to you because they can read things they are interested in on your blog. If you had an angry-atheist blog that mocked non-atheists, and you switch over to a devout Catholic conversion-story blog, you will probably lose all the old blog’s readers and find new readers. Probably MORE and nicer new readers if you mocked on the old blog and don’t do that now. 

Most blogging advice I have read says to focus on one topic for blogging success, but that leaves me torn. I am too much of a Renaissance woman to confine myself to one topic. And though I have other blogs (for low-carb/keto living, for Esperanto, and for other odd languages) I find it hard to keep up with lots of blogs and so no longer start new blogs anytime I become interested in something.

So on this blog you will find blogging-improvement posts, writing/authorship posts, posts about Asperger Syndrome (autism spectrum disorder,) poetry-related posts, and faith-based posts including ones on the Lutheran rosary (I am an ex-Lutheran who prayed the rosary in my Lutheran days, and only dared to tell one other Lutheran. Who said, ‘Me, too.’)

Back to YOU and your blog. Whether your blogging brand includes one major topic or many, it’s good to have an image that relates to your blog plastered all over it. For author bloggers, I’m afraid it will have to be your author photo. Sadly, I have always been so ashamed of my body that I hated having pictures taken. So there are few old photos for me to choose from. And I can’t get new pictures taken— since my health problems last February I make Ruth Bader Ginsberg look young and sexy. I’m thinking of commissioning a manga-style ‘cartoon’ portrait of me with variations so I can be different races (like Klingon and elven) and different ages and stuff. 

Some people who would rather be anonymous use logos to help establish their blogging brand. Hey, it works for corporations! For example, a corporate wage slave who writes things that don’t share the corporate brand, or perhaps doesn’t ‘believe all women’ or support same-sex marriage, may need to blog anonymously to keep the day job. 

Also, some people, like Gundi Gabrielle, use a color to establish brand. For her, it is a vivid pink. (Ugh!) I’m thinking of using a blue in the teal/cyan/turquoise family as part of my brand.

Well, I’ve rambled on a bit about blogging brands. This was intended to be a 350-word quick post and I’m nearing 600 words. So it’s time for me to stop now, and let you-all say what you think or know about blogging brands in a comment.

Thanks for reading so far,

Nissa Annakindt

 

My new FB group about author-blogs needs more victims (members.) Join at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/310331253293318/

Christian Author Blogs: Papa Don’t Preach

Author blogging is a major step forward for a lot of authors (and aspiring authors.) And Christian authors are authors too, and may experience discrimination in the mainstream writing world where publishers want strong LGBT characters even in YA children’s books, but would turn up his nose at a writer who put in an Evangelical or Catholic character without saying what ‘haters’ they are. (‘Haters’ — the new hate-epithet to use against people you hate and are bigoted against.)

Christian fiction is accused of being “preachy’ even by people who have never once read even page 1 in a Christian book. And, yes, some Christian fiction is. Check out Salem Kirban’s novel and-or sermon 666, which as a novel is a great sermon on the Rapture doctrine. Evangelical fiction has ‘preachy’ roots because some Evangelical/Fundamentalist churches used to teach that when you get saved you give up ‘worldly’ novels the same way you give up alcohol, movies and owning a pack of playing cards.  (Most of these groups are far less strict now— women can even wear makeup!)

But ‘preachiness’ is less tolerated in fiction, even by the most devout Christians. And so your blog shouldn’t be too preachy, either. You can mention faith-related issues, but if you are putting up sermons or devotionals, you may find that many of your book readers and fans don’t really want you playing pastor for them.

It’s understandable. I’m a Catholic convert but in my obsessive reading life I will gladly read books by Evangelicals and LDS/Mormons and Eastern Orthodox Christians and Mennonites— so long as they can tell good stories. But I don’t want to get into denominational debates with these people and have them preach at me. If I want preaching I’ll go to the church of my own choice. If I want a devotional I will buy a devotional book, usually a Catholic one. 

Now, of course if you are a full-time pastor of whatever church, perhaps someone with years of seminary training, perhaps someone who does his daily Bible reading in Hebrew and Greek, then your preaching will be worth blogging, but perhaps not on your author blog. You might have a pastor-blog and a Christian author blog to keep the one topic from overwhelming the other. But if you are far too busy to maintain two blogs, a preachy author blog may be right for you, especially if you write fiction with a lot of faith content. 

If you are NOT a pastor, you might want the faith content on your blog to be less overwhelming. Just because someone read your Amish romance or Bible-based fantasy doesn’t mean they welcome your views on whether Cain or Judas went to hell or whether God doesn’t listen to the prayers of Jewish people or the One Right Way to have morning devotions. 

This doesn’t mean denying your faith. It means being more subtle. If you can. With my Asperger Syndrome subtle may not be my thing. Which is why I’m writing about Christian author blogging instead of something not explicitly Christian. Perhaps something that would promote my blogging book. (See blog sidebar or books page.)

Of course not only is each Christian author blogger going to have a unique style, people from different church backgrounds will have different traits in their author blogs. Not just Catholic author blogs being different from Protestant/Evangelical ones, but Southern Baptist author bloggers may be a bit different from Freewill Baptist author bloggers. But preachiness, unless you are a gifted preacher, may not be your best blogging style.

Bloggy greetings from

Nissa Annakindt & her cats

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You will notice this post introduces a new topic with a new graphic. Graphic self-inflicted, made on Canva. I’ve decided to write some things specifically for Christian author-bloggers, not because I’m not keen on Jewish persons or Buddhists who author-blog, but because I personally am Christian & know lots of Christian authors & author-bloggers so I have perspective on it. 

New author-blogger FB group! Members wanted!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/310331253293318/