Fred On Something'sComments

A Successful Blog

I’ve had so much great feedback on my “Be a more productive blogger� post that I’ve decided to dedicate a Web site (and blog) to the concept. Way back I did a series of posts over at Asterisk on how to design, build and maintain a successful blog. Those posts were very popular and seemed to help quite a few people. After that I’d write on a fairly regular basis about tips, tricks and techniques for bloggers and, again, those posts seemed to be helpful for many people.

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I am sure that you learned a lot in the process, the opposite would be surprising

It’s the same for me. I initially started blogging to try increasing my English skills and it worked like a charm (It’s not perfect but far better than 8 months ago hehehe)

I also meet really interesting people; I constantly clarified my thoughts by posting and discussions about these posts with my readers, etc. Only a fool could not learn from such a process that blogging is. It’s the magic of writing: something I had not discovered, and even suspected, before starting to blog.

In answer to:

Great! I have never thought about it before.
Yes, we can use a bookmark, anyway reading for pleasure is not alway easy if you have to work and/or study, and short chapters could psicologically help us to plan our reading time.
BTW, one thing I always loved are the chapter titles; not all books have a title for each chapter, but I think they are a delicious anticipation of what you’re going to read, like watching at the menu card at the restaurant. It’s like blog’s post, isn’t it?
The question is: why so many writers use long chapters? It could be a style choice, of course. Sometimes, the author could desire to give a specific rhythm to the story; it’s like movies: the director could choice to show the facts in a few minutes, or - au contraire - to give the spectator the time to reflect while they happen.
I do think there’s a rhythm in any story, and this rhythm should be given by the author. A pause in reading, sometimes, could be like a second of silence in a musical composition: it’s void, but important.
At the other hand, I think very often (not always) there’s no logical reason to trunk a story in a point or the other. Sometimes it really seems casual. What do you think about?
Another reason for chapters’ length could be a technical one: expecially when you are not famous, the editors use to ask one or two chapters to evaluate your work. Then, if you want to show your talent, you can’t give him just ten pages, even beautiful.

I love chapter titles too. I think in next years (10 or 20) the way to edit books will change according to blogs. We need the time to explore the concept and the way we’ll edit blogs; what’s the best way to do it. When blogs will get mature, I think that editors will incorporate some ideas in traditional books editing like chapter titles

Many authors say: think simple. Create short sentences with short and meaningful words. I thing that this “minimalist” vision could be applicable in a more global view: the chapters.