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MOVING MOVABLE TYPE
The established barriers of the modern publishing industry did not exist in the early days of printing. Nowadays, a novelist has little or no say in the jacket design or typeface — that’s left to the marketing team, who hire graphic artists, typesetters, and other subcontracters to perform the tasks. Infamously, many cover artists haven’t even read the book they are designing for, leading to some oddly innappropriate covers.
Amongst early printers, that wasn’t always the case. The workshops of the Estienne Family, a Parisian print house, were notable for the involvement of their authors. Charles Estienne, a doctor and brother to master printer Henri, not only wrote books for publication, he personally carved the woodcut images to accompany the text. For example, he published one book on all the known fish of the world, and personally set the typeface and illustrated it:
Oronce Finé, a French astronomer and mathematician not only drew the woodcut print illustrations that accompanied his books (among them the influential work De Mundi Sphaera), he also designed the typeface.
Now, it’s certainly the case that with ready-made blogger, WordPress and LiveJournal templates anyone who “can type a sentence…can probably use a blog” (Farkas, pg. 12). But in many ways we find ourselves back in Estienne’s workshop, with the opportunity to tinker with the typography ourselves. A dedicated blogger isn’t merely a writer; they need to develop an eye for graphic design, choose a look from amongst a slew of templates, tweak the designs to their liking, or develop their own. They need to pay attention to things like column width, consider links, directories, archives, trackbacks, etc. It goes well beyond writing. While many contemporary published authors are no doubt relieved to leave such technical details in the hands of professionals, the amateur blogger has more leeway — and there is a certain democratizing beauty to that.
The Elements of a Successful Blog
What is success? How can it be defined?
Meredith Farkas’ book, Social Software in Libraries, makes the point that the term “blog” is used to describe completely different uses. For example, the Becker-Posner Blog (the joint project of a federal judge and award winning economist) and a “blog written by a teenage girl about her personal life” both qualify (Farkas, pgs. 11-12). The goal of one and the other are vastly different; the number of readers, the nature of comments (or if comments are even allowed), the content provided. So when we talk about blogging, we’re really talking about a set of technology tools, not a style of writing.
Farkas describes a number of the usual elements: archives of past posts by date or category; dated, timestamped entries; permalinks to individual posts; reverse-chronological postings (the most recent post at the top); and a two- or three-column format. Some blogs encourage comments, provide search features, or trackbacks to allow the administrator to find links to his or her post (Farkas, 11-13). A number of these features are included as standard options on popular services like blogger, Wordpress or LiveJournal.
Farkas divides blogs into three categories: filters, personal journals, and knowledge logs, but I believe just three categories is inadequate for the range of what can be found — even just within the “biblioblogosphere”. But for now, let’s accept this definition of a blog and move on to the question at hand: success.
Measuring Success
When my wife and I created our baby blog, our goal was to post periodic updates on her pregnancy and childbirth and the life of our daughter. We wanted our immediate friends and family to know how we were doing as a family, and create a chronicle of her life in the process. Two and a half years on, we don’t have more than 20-30 readers per week. Each post generally garners between 2-5 comments. But for us, that is success! We look back on old posts to reminisce. Family members will mention in conversation things they saw on our blog, or save some of the photos we post. That blog has achieved its goals.
Any blogger starting out should contemplate their goals and vision for their blog: are they trying to relay information, develop a community, make a profit, or write a memoir? How many readers make it successful? Is it for friends and family, or do you hope to shape a professional field? Only with these answers in hand can you set about meeting your goals.
Achieving Success
There are plenty of sites that will tell you what to do or not do with your blog. Raj Dash’s post “41 Reasons Your Blog Probably Sucks” is focused on blogging for profit and suggests you stay away from the overly personal*. In contrast, Write to Done’s “12 Essential Blogging Tips” kicks off with “write from the heart”, telling the writer to use personal examples in their writing. What to make of this?
*As an aside, I found Dash’s blog, Performancing, a marvel of poor visual design that breaks at least several of his 41 rules. Well, I guess design is a subjective thing.
Here are my own subjective suggestions, culled from their lists and from others:
- Keep it interesting by using a thematic connection (even as format and subject varies).
- Make it personal — without navel-gazing.
- Post regularly.
- Provide links to useful or interesting sites or information.
- If you want a wide audience, promote, promote, promote.
Reference: Farkas, M.G. (2007). Social software in libraries. Medford: Information Today, Inc.
