Month: December 2013

Not Every Blog Needs a Comment Section. In Fact, Most Might Do Better Without Them

Think the comment sections on YouTube videos are the cesspools of the Internet? You’re not alone. The AP has an interesting article up on the steps some sites, including YouTube, are taking to curb the rampant vile behavior you often find on comment sections across the Internet:

“Mix blatant bigotry with poor spelling. Add a dash of ALL CAPS. Top it off with a violent threat. And there you have it: A recipe for the worst of online comments, scourge of the Internet.

Blame anonymity, blame politicians, blame human nature. But a growing number of websites are reining in the Wild West of online commentary. Companies including Google and the Huffington Post are trying everything from deploying moderators to forcing people to use their real names in order to restore civil discourse. Some sites, such as Popular Science, are banning comments altogether …” [Read the rest.]

As I said to a friend of mine the other day, the fastest way I can find to lower my opinion of humanity is to read the comment sections on major news sites like CNN.com, so I’m glad to see some of them taking steps to curb some of this behavior.  While total anonymity doesn’t bring out the worst in everybody, it certainly brings out the worst in the worst of us, and since only the bored, the passionate, or the enraged tend to comment on the Internet at all, the percentage of people who seem like loons is magnified.

This article got me thinking about whether a blog needs to have a comment section at all to be successful, or whether it’s just a personal choice depending on the inclinations of the person doing the blogging.  A little Googling led me to Mark Hughes, who blogs at Forbes.com, and who had an interesting take on this question in his post “Are Comments the Measure of a Successful Blog?”

“My blog has received a total of only 1,289 comments in a period of about a year and a half. That’s an average of around 71 comments per month, and many of them are from me personally in discussions with readers, so really probably only about 60 or so per month are from readers.

And really, about half of all of the comments I’ve gotten in the last 18 or so months came on just five or so articles/posts. Meaning I really probably only get about 20 comments per month from readers most of the time. Of those, some are from the same people posting multiple comments, so we could safely say the number of unique individuals commenting on my blog per month is around 15 or so.

But despite that low level of commenting, I had a million-and-a-quarter total views last month, with more than 550,000 unique visitors. That was a pretty good month for me, my first topping a million views, but I pretty consistently average in the quarter-million range for unique visitors (sometimes much higher, sometimes closer to 200,000) and have a very healthy repeat viewership percentage as well.”

The rest of the post is well worth reading.  I know that Andrew Sullivan, one of the most popular bloggers on the Internet, has no comment section at all.  It certainly hasn’t hurt his traffic.

Although I haven’t blogged very frequently the past ten years, that’s something I’m planning on changing as the nature of my writing career and my day job at the university have grown closer together, and one of the questions I’ve wrestled with is whether to turn the comment section back on.  Since this blog until now was mostly just news related to my fiction, with the occasional post (three or four times a year if that) about writing or publishing that might be of interest to a wider audience, I didn’t think it needed a comment section.  Now I’m leaning toward keeping it off, because I’d rather channel any energy and time that would go to managing a comment section into posting more frequently.

That said, I certainly think a comment section can be a viable part of a blog, if managed properly.  I even find myself commenting on a few.   But necessary?  I can’t find much evidence to support that conclusion.

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas (for Writers)



‘Twas the Night Before Christmas (for Writers)
(an arrangement by Scott William Carter)


‘Twas the night before Christmas when all through the publishing house

Not an editor was stirring, not even an intern’s mouse

All the contracts were done by the lawyers with care

In the hopes that poor writers would see them as fair

Then what to editors’ bleary eyes should appear

A miniature device holding a million books — right here!

A nerdy bald-headed man so bright and deft

I knew in a moment it must be Saint Jeff


And more rapid than paper, his device produced

Chaucer and Grisham and Patterson and Proust

And so on to the homes the orders soon flew

With packages full of Kindles and gift cards, too


Into the writer’s lives the Kindle came with a bound

It was dressed in opportunity and the future was sound

It turned not a page but there was no doubt it would stay

And filled all the bank accounts with a seventy percent day


And laying his finger on the side of his eReader

Then giving a tap onto the Internet Jeff loss-leadered

But I heard him Tweet as he dissolved out of sight

“Merry Christmas to all authors and to all authors — just write!”



The Best Advice I’ve Gotten on Promotion Was From a Comedian

Award-winning writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch has been running a great series on promotion for writers (which I highly recommend you read, whether you’re a writer or just someone who’s interested in how writers find readers), and it got me thinking about the best advice I’ve ever gotten about how to find an audience.  It was this:

Be so good they can’t ignore you.

It was actually from Steve Martin, a comedian.  Well, the truth is, he’s actually a writer, too, as most good comedians are. Martin may have said this before, but I first heard him say it in an interview with Charlie Rose, when he was asked what he tells people when they want advice on how to break into show business.

“Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear,” Martin said. “What they want to hear is ‘Here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script,’ . . . but I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you … If somebody’s thinking, ‘How can I be really good?’ people are going to come to you.”

Of course, what’s good is somewhat subjective, so in the end only you can be the judge of what’s good.  But instead of thinking about how to use Facebook to promote your book, how to reach readers through Twitter, or, God forbid, how to build your “author platform,” bet on being good.  Do what Steve Martin did.  Ask yourself why others succeed?  Study their work.  Break it down.  Then apply what you learned to your own work and do something new and innovative in your own way.

There’s no secret sauce, no magic bullets.  It’s not about who you know.  You don’t need anyone’s permission.  Yes, luck plays a part, as it does in all things in life, but if you’re really good — and I’m talking about being so good that people can’t help but notice — luck will find you.

Yes, that’s the harder path, but it’s also a lot more fun.

Not Every Moment of Your Life Must Be Recorded

Sherry Turkle has a nice piece in The New York Times about the dangers of “The Documented Life” that fits right into some of my thinking about the need to live more of a plugged/unplugged life.  Here’s a key passage:

“Technology doesn’t just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are. The selfie makes us accustomed to putting ourselves and those around us “on pause” in order to document our lives. It is an extension of how we have learned to put our conversations “on pause” when we send or receive a text, an image, an email, a call. When you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts, you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking.

We don’t experience interruptions as disruptions anymore. But they make it hard to settle into serious conversations with ourselves and with other people because emotionally, we keep ourselves available to be taken away from everything.”

Except for a strange little aside that perpetuates the myth that President Obama was being rude taking a “selfie” at Nelson Mandela’s funeral, it’s well worth reading the whole thing.