So what if an agent finds your blog...

Neil Gaiman works in every genre and medium available to him. I really don't think that's a problem. What matters is if you think the work you put out there in everything you do is appropriate for you, in my opinion.

He's also Neil Gaiman.

Point. But it supports what you were saying about how quality counts.

I forgot to mention: I know of at least a couple of authors who have clauses in their contracts that they must maintain a blog/website. So, not only do they read them, they can actually contract with you to keep them up!

Karen Junker said:

I forgot to mention: I know of at least a couple of authors who have clauses in their contracts that they must maintain a blog/website. So, not only do they read them, they can actually contract with you to keep them up!

Click to expand...

Do they get compensated for doing this?

I don't know the details -- but I presume the amount of their compensation includes not only the manuscript(s) cited in the contract but also the other writing/blogging.

Karen Junker said:

I don't know the details -- but I presume the amount of their compensation includes not only the manuscript(s) cited in the contract but also the other writing/blogging.

Click to expand...

That sounds like a no to me.

Well, how familiar are you with contracts? If something is listed as what you must do to earn the money you will be paid, then it would be compensation. IANAL, so I can't really go into more detail.

Karen Junker said:

Well, how familiar are you with contracts? If something is listed as what you must do to earn the money you will be paid, then it would be compensation. IANAL, so I can't really go into more detail.

Click to expand...

What it sounds like to me is that the publisher was willing to pay X for the manuscript and got the blog for free.

Haphazard said:

...and finds fanfiction, or, horror of horrors, bad writing?

A lot of people in another thread are talking about agents looking at blogs.

I've posted a significant amount of fanfiction of questionable quality to my blog. It's not linked to me by name but it's linked to me from here. Will this pose a problem if an agent finds me and finds that my posted writing sucks?

A lot of the fanfiction is done in serial format and isn't carefully proofread because, to be honest, the audience doesn't care much. The quality of this is hopefully not going to be anywhere near the quality of something I send for submission. It's just something I do for fun when I can't think of any original fiction to write. Also, small segments of what I'm working on now are posted as Teaser Tuesday, but these are generally very rough and unedited and there aren't a lot of them. If an agent finds these labeled under the same title I've queried them for, especially if they're not very good, will that be a huge red flag?

Click to expand...

I have a fandom blog with a username. On that blog, I talk about fandom things and occasionally post fan fiction for a fandom that the creator has encouraged fans to write fan fiction for. I have a very supportive group of fandom friends who enjoy my fan fiction. When I realize my dream and get my original manuscripts published, I plan to share my joy with my fan fiction readers.

I also have a writer's blog where I discuss my original writing and my journey toward publication. I try to keep that blog friendly yet professional.

I keep them separate, but it would be very easy for anyone to dig deep and find the connection between my fandom name and my romance writing pen name. I'm not ashamed of my fan fiction writings. Anyone reading them can see the progress I've made as a writer, as I used the fan fiction playground to practice my craft, but I also had two or three proofreaders/beta readers for every story.

I just think it works best for me to keep the two blogs separate.

Haphazard said:

If an agent finds these labeled under the same title I've queried them for, especially if they're not very good, will that be a huge red flag?

Click to expand...

There's an awful lot of interesting stuff, povs, advice both pro and con, on this thread. But here's my answer to the question that started it all: Yes.

If I (Ms. Agent) am thinking of offering you representation, and I Google you, (which I will do regardless of anyone's opinion on the matter), and I find stuff online which you have written which absolutely sucks...

Why would I want to represent you?

You could argue, and many have, well the agent needs to look at the ms, the writing he or she will try to sell and blah blah blah. Poppycock. You'd have to be sending me (the agent) a potential Nobel Prize winner for me to say, yeah well that blog, let's ignore it. It really can't be representative of how he/she writes when they really work at it.

All your writing is representative of you, the writer, so all of it needs to be as crisp, clean and good as you can make it. Even here.

So back to you, the writer: Getting representation is hard enough, why make it any harder?

jaksen said:

So back to you, the writer: Getting representation is hard enough, why make it any harder?

Click to expand...

I think the answer is that for some it is because their blogs/facebook page/twitter account are very important to them. Perhaps even the most important things in their lives.

I personally don't get it, but the reality is for some people, they spend hours a day on blogs/facebook/twitter, on their own pages and perusing others. The blogs make the blogger feel like they are being heard by someone - they think they have something to say and for now at least a blog is their only venue for being heard.

For many of these writers, the only place they will ever be published is on their blog and so this discussion is irrelevant. But for those who think they have a shot at getting published the more traditional way, you need to accept the fact that what you post on the Internet can affect your chances.

It doesn't matter that you think it is unfair. The people with the power to reject or accept your work for publication don't care and they can and will do whatever they think is in their best business interest.

People search for everything now a days. If they read a book they like, they may search for info on the author and if they don't like what they find, that may turn them off to buying anything else by that author. Agents know that and so they want to see what is out there before they invest their time and reputation in representing an author.

Some time back I remember a minor dustup concerning GRRM and his latest book. Apparently, on his blog (LiveJournal, I believe), he had spent considerable time blogging about football. It seemed he was watching a lot of football and had some opinions on it. It's his blog, it's not just about writing but about the author's life and so he wrote in it.

Many of his fans who are getting tired of waiting for the next book started getting shirty about it. "Well, if he has all this time to devote to watching and writing about football, he can finish this book he's been promising us for YEARS and has already blown several PROMSED DEADLINES OMG!"

Sure, it's his journal. He can write whatever he damn well pleases. He writes the journal to keep up with his fans and so the fans can have some insight into him. Yet there were still people who followed and thought they had a RIGHT to dictate how he spent his spare time. (I believe Neil Gaiman wrote his internet-famous The Writer Is Not Your Bitch post in response to a letter someone wrote about it)

The points here are:

1) if you're an author and have a blog that is available to the public to read, people are going to make some judgments about it. This includes prospective employers, fans, media-types and random passers bys.

2) it's on the internet. You may want to believe that your family, friends and loved ones won't ever post your PERSONAL information online but the truth of the matter is, they will. What they post, how much they post and when, you don't have control of.

3) once it's on the net, it takes a long time to propigate off into the depths of obscurity. Someone savvy will still be able to dig it up. If you don't believe it, then you are far too trusting that people in the name of common decency won't. Simply go to any fan based forum and read through wanks that flare up from time to time. Anonmity on the net makes a lot of people very nasty. Very. Nasty.

4) no matter how anonymous you try to be, you aren't as anonymous as you think you are. There are people out there who know how to find out. No, an agent or publisher may not go to extreme lengths to find information out about you but fans will. And they do. And then repeat what they find out.

What you may want people to think of you in reading anything you put out there and what they come away with is not something you can control. Period.

Sagana said:

You seem to be saying public == internet and yep, I disagree. Share Your Work here, for example, is double password protected specifically to keep it from being public.

Click to expand...

It is public, sagana. That password? Has already been shared inside posts made on the forum. Yeah, you have to be a member to see it on the menu page but I've seen it listed inside posts to other people here. And it's not like the mods here run background checks on its members. We all are abiding by the rule 'respect your fellow writer'. But an unscrupulous person can easily come on this board, get a sign in name, go to SYW and Copy and Paste anything there and put it out on the web to be picked up by search engines.

I can't imagine what it would gain them but that's not the point. The point is that the piece of work you submitted and trusted to be private? Isn't. Period. It's not private. People can STILL get to it. They can STILL read it. They can STILL do whatever it is they please to it elsewhere.

Whether anyone likes it or not, we are still judged in this day and age by what we say, what we do, what we look like. If we show up at an interview for a job in a business office and the dresscode is business, in jeans and a tshirt? Regardless of how stellar our resume and work history is, they are going to look at us in our jeans and tshirt and make snap judgments about us. That's how it works.

A good friend of mine was job hunting. He has a facebook page and uses his real name. Certainly his right and his perogative. Facebook is a networking site for friends. His main avatar for the longest was him posing with his favorite pistol, pointed straight at the camera. Very Dirty Harry-like.

He wasn't getting any job offers. He wasn't even getting many interviews. He couldn't figure out why. I pulled him aside and suggested he change his Facebook image. He didn't have to take his photoalbum down where he had dozens of images of him showing off his huge collection of guns. Just to put a more neutral avatar that shows up when you hit his wall.

He got a job interview in a week, a job offer the week after that.

Coincidence?

It all comes down to selling, and the biggest dilemma in selling is, do you change your market or do you change your product?

If you want to write for a financial journal and your FB page is full of pictures of you acting like Dirty Harry, you might want to change your product, or at least the packaging, to appeal to your target audience.

But what if you want to write for Gun Fanciers Quarterly? Will there be people out there who hate your love of guns and badmouth you on the net because of it? Of course, but unless they're the editors, readers and/or advertisers of gun publications, who cares what they think? If any one thing could appeal to everyone, there would only be one brand of cola in the world (and in re changing product for greater appeal, anyone remember New Coke or Crystal Pepsi?).

Now, a disclaimer because I think I'm seeing a lot of conflation between putting up shoddy stuff on the internet and putting up quirky or odd or personal stuff on the internet. So once more for the record: I do not condone anyone who wants to be a writer putting out on the net writing they know to be bad.

That said, I feeling like I'm getting mixed messages here. On the one hand we are told that we cannot control how others will see and judge what we put on the net, and on the other hand we are told we have to control how we are seen and judged by anticipating other people's reactions and heading them off.

We can't have it both ways. It can't be controllable and out of our control at the same time.

My argument is that creatives, like writers, artists, performers, should (a) be mindful of the public image we are trying to cultivate and always do the best we can at whatever we put out there, (b) accept the fact that there's no accounting for taste and that even the most innocuous thing might set some people off with neither rhyme nor reason, (c) be artists, be writers, get out there and do it - whatever it is any one of us is going to do - and if it causes headaches, resolve them; if it brings down heat from random strangers, deal with it; if it brings attention, make the most of it. Isn't that why we're blogging, writing, performing, etc., in the first place?

ETA: This is reminding me of a scene from "Impromptu" which I watched last night (before the game ), when Mandy Patankin as poet Alfred De Musset yells at Hugh Grant as Chopin, "Art does not apologize!" (I'm slightly kidding. Slightly. ) I think I'm going to have to blog about this. (That part's serious.)

muravyets said:

It all comes down to selling, and the biggest dilemma in selling is, do you change your market or do you change your product?

Click to expand...

Exactly!

muravyets said:

If you want to write for a financial journal and your FB page is full of pictures of you acting like Dirty Harry, you might want to change your product, or at least the packaging, to appeal to your target audience.

Click to expand...

And another exactly!

muravyets said:

Now, a disclaimer because I think I'm seeing a lot of conflation between putting up shoddy stuff on the internet and putting up quirky or odd or personal stuff on the internet. So once more for the record: I do not condone anyone who wants to be a writer putting out on the net writing they know to be bad.

Click to expand...

And I have to agree here, too. It also segues nicely into public face and not-so-public faces.

Someone upstream said they have a few blogs and they keep them separate. One is their 'fandom' face, one is their 'writer' face. If they take a little care in creation of those, they can be kept separated.

I have a facebook. The name is one I use when I play WoW and it's a name derivation off my main raiding toon. No personal information on there. It's where I play my internet games and share my silly links and youtubes and stay in contact with my friends. I would not link it as any sort of employment-attraction because yes, it is my own personal little sandbox. That's why it does not have my real name or business email attached to it.

And there's nothing wrong with me wanting to keep it separate so that I make the best possible impression when someone decides to google my real name. I'm not ashamed of my WoW activities or my facebook presence. But I also understand how some prospective employers might view it and so I make the choice to present the best possible me.

muravyets said:

That said, I feeling like I'm getting mixed messages here. On the one hand we are told that we cannot control how others will see and judge what we put on the net, and on the other hand we are told we have to control how we are seen and judged by anticipating other people's reactions and heading them off.

We can't have it both ways. It can't be controllable and out of our control at the same time.

Click to expand...

You're right. We can, however, mitigate exposure. We don't want people to view us in a poor light? We can't control that. No matter what we do, if someone is looking to get offended, they will be.

If, on the other hand, we intentionally put it out there to be offensive? Well, that's something we can control. It's the choice we make.

So...I think we're agreeing here and I'm just giving my keyboard a work out.

It just distresses me, sometimes, when I see people trying to say 'but this webpresence is mine and it's me and it's private'. No. It's not private. Unless they're really savvy in how to do so, it's not and people will see it and they will make some determinations about them based on it. If they don't care that they do, then they're golden, carry on you crazy diamond, you!

If they do...then, there's something they can do to minimize that.

But to deny that it happens at all, or to throw their arms in the air and say 'but it's so unfair and therefore I don't care if they do or not', well...again...a decision they make that could potentially hurt them in the end.

And as it's been stated above, why would they want to do that?

muravyets said:

My argument is that creatives, like writers, artists, performers, should (a) be mindful of the public image we are trying to cultivate and always do the best we can at whatever we put out there, (b) accept the fact that there's no accounting for taste and that even the most innocuous thing might set some people off with neither rhyme nor reason, (c) be artists, be writers, get out there and do it - whatever it is any one of us is going to do - and if it causes headaches, resolve them; if it brings down heat from random strangers, deal with it; if it brings attention, make the most of it. Isn't that why we're blogging, writing, performing, etc., in the first place?

Click to expand...

[nodnodnod] Which is what most people in this thread who are saying 'be mindful of what you put out on the internet. It is your public face. It is not private like you think it is.'

If the webblogger wants to blog about their progression through a tvshow/game/webcomic, that's well within their rights to do so. I think it can still be done professionally as I've seen webbloggers from people who I think highly off who do. I don't think less of them for doing so. Not even GRRM.

There are people out there who do. The ones who do...well, it's up to us whether our musings about an anime show can help or hurt us or if we launch into a virulent, vomit-spewing tirade about a public figure. They're both ours to do if we like.

And people are going to take that, at face value, and make judgments about us. No, we can't control what they think...and yes, in some ways we can. Maybe, we should think twice on publicly slagging off on someone where other people can see and make judgments about us. They can't judge what they can't see.

muravyets said:

ETA: This is reminding me of a scene from "Impromptu" which I watched last night (before the game ), when Mandy Patankin as poet Alfred De Musset yells at Hugh Grant as Chopin, "Art does not apologize!" (I'm slightly kidding. Slightly. ) I think I'm going to have to blog about this. (That part's serious.)

Click to expand...

You totally should!

Haphazard said:

Okay, so I should just completely delete my blog because everything on there is terrible.

Click to expand...

Question for you, Haphazard. Do you write under this name? Is your blog under this ID or under your real name?

Do you slag off about people? To you post nasty creeds about animals/celebrities/politicians/food or whatever your interest is?

Is your blog in eye-bleeding colors? Are your avatars obscene and graphic?

If the answer is no to the majority of these things, then why worry? Enjoy your blog, write about the things that you love. Squeal and squee and be an enthusiastic fan. There's no harm in it. I doubt very seriously the agent is going to be combing through your post going "OMG Haphazard typed teh instead of the....so not going to offer representation".

bUT iF YoU tYPe LIkE thIS AlL tHE tImE? Maybe you might want to reconsider tying your writing face to that blog.

Note I didn't say shut it down and give up ever being a fan and ever not enjoying another thing online EVER AGAIN!

Just be mindful of the kind of image that it projects and make the decision, knowing what the potential consequences might be.

That's all.

I have a blog where I squee about hawt guiz! I'm a huge anime fan. And that blog is not tied to my real name or any name I will be writing under. When I decide to start up a writer's blog, I will be a little more discriminating in what I post and how I phrase things. Nothing more. Just being aware of the now public face. It won't stop me from doing it...just makes me more aware.

I should think you'd be okay as long as you're not as bad as the acquaintance of mine who bitches about agents on her blog and whines about her ex dumping her, not that she ever loved him anyway and oh God, her job is terrible and she hasn't written anything in ages, but agents are idiots anyway.

Not the Rejection Queen, before you ask. Someone much more whiny and precious than that.

and still a friend?

aaah, completely misread that....my fault entirely

I have plenty of "aquaintances" also, some of whom I would love to smack with a rubber mallet. None of them write, or if they did, I've been lucky enough not to have to hear about THAT, too.....these are folks who are already unpleasant and pretentious, without needing one more "artsy" feather in their cap

This person definitely isn't a friend. She's even more unprofessional than I am, if you can imagine that!

I use the word 'acquaintance' to refer to people I merely know. Friends are acquaintances I like.

scarlett, you get to sell books AND be blunt. And apparently work in "pyjamas". I consider your professionalism a model I should mold myself after.

then again, you should have seen the horror in my wife's eyes when I told her at my last job interview I blanked on the first question, told them I did not have the answer (what is the function of the endoplasmic reticulum?) and then said "Oh crap, now I'm not gonna get the job."

(I did get the job, to our mutual amazement)