Book or Blog – which to write?

Someone recently asked me for assistance in writing a book. Like many people in my age category, books are what comes to mind when we think about writing something. But because some of his writings are about current events (Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, etc.) I suggested that a blog may be a better medium for those topics. So, he asked how to make the decision about which medium to use. Below is my answer.

This long answer is probably much more than you thought you would get when you asked what belongs in the book and what belongs in a blog. I’d like to go into a fair amount of depth in my response. In order to answer this question, one needs to examine several aspects of writing, in particular addressing the following topics: (1) who are the ones who would buy a book or read a blog; (2) who am I trying to reach with my writing; (3) how timely is what I am writing about; and (4) how will the choice of medium influence what I am writing. Let me examine each of these in turn.

 

Who would buy a book or read a blog?

Books are somewhat permanent things. They are relatively long, i.e., they are not designed to be read in one sitting. They sit on a shelf for a relatively long period, i.e., several years. And they are relatively costly, even if they only cost $5.00.

Unless one is already somewhat famous, the number of copies that one can sell of a book is pretty small. If the author is someone like Hillary Clinton, Senator X, LeBron James, or a popular movie star, then they can sell thousands of copies. But you and I are not in that category. The people who would want a book about us is limited to our family and friends. That doesn’t mean that what we have to say is not valuable. I wish that some of my ancestors had written a book about themselves so that I could better understand the times they lived in and why they made the choices they did. In fact, that’s why I wrote my own auto-biography – because there were so many questions that I wish I had asked my father about his life and I didn’t want my descendants to have the same unanswered questions about me. Our grandchildren and even our unborn great-grandchildren will enjoy being about to read about one of their ancestors. Only one of the books that I’ve published has sold more than a few dozen copies and that is because the author spent the last several years of his life speaking to groups about his WWII experiences and then sold a copy of his book to those who had come to hear him.

In summary, the people who can be expected to buy your book are probably people who already know you. And unless you are famous, that group of people is relatively small.

On the other hand, blogs are shorter – they are usually read on one’s smartphone or perhaps a PC and for maximum impact need to be fairly compact so they can be read and grasped quickly. Most people expect them to be either free or at least free to anyone who has a subscription to something. And they are often transient.

Because they are shorter and cheaper (probably free for most of us), the thoughts expressed in a blog entry can be widely disbursed. Who knows, perhaps one of them may “go viral” and be read by thousands. They are not “historical”, but nearly always on a topic of current interest.

Again, in summary, the people who can be expected to read your blog may know you, but one would hope that you can reach people who don’t know you well – so you need to make the barrier to gaining a reader much smaller than the investment of $5 or of the time to read a book.

 

Who am I trying to reach?

This question grows quite naturally out of the last one. A book like an autobiography has a target audience of those who want to know you – you personally. The purpose in writing such a book is so that your experiences and perspectives are not lost. The self-publishing market is full of these types of books, and they serve a good purpose – so that we do not forget about the past. I love it when my grandchildren ask, “tell us a grandpa story!” That shows that they have an interest in the past that can help guide them in the future.

But while we can also use the medium of a blog to tell stories, we can also use them to educate or to advocate. And this is a great use of this medium. A blog can be very timely – commenting on current events, pointing out the truth or fallacy of a current newsworthy story, helping to give perspective. And thus, the audience that we are trying to reach is much broader than simply those who already know us.

 

How timely is what I am writing about?

Because books are made to sit on a shelf for some indefinite period of time, they need to cover material that is somewhat timeless as well. Autobiographies are great in that we want our grandchildren or great-grandchildren or even generations beyond them to be able to still read what we have written. We want them to understand the environment in which we grew up, the challenges we faced, and why we made the choices that we did.

Blogs, on the other hand, are often about very current topics. While we can still give perspective on why we view these topics the way that we do, one should not expect that people are going to read these types of postings in the future – or at least that they will not read them for the same purpose. But to get people’s attention, a blog post needs to not only be timely, but short enough that people can read it quickly – people have many things competing for their time, so they can’t spend much time reading what we’ve written. The more timely the subject, the shorter our posting needs to be. However, there is also a place for longer “opinion pieces” that we can then refer people to if they have more time.

To judge currency, ask the questions: would I have written about this 2-3 years ago; would I still write about this 2 years from now? If it’s older than that or is apt to change in the near future, then a blog is a better place than a book. For example, writing about a current bill making its way through Congress doesn’t belong in a book – a few months from now it may have been defeated and be a moot point. But advocacy for passing/defeating it is appropriate for a blog.

 

How does the choice of medium influence me?

The quick answer is – quite a lot, and in several ways.

First, a chapter in a book can easily be 5-10 pages or more. There needs to be sufficient depth and development of the topic of that chapter so that the book is not too “choppy”. On the other hand, a blog entry should be short enough to be read on a smartphone, perhaps the equivalent of only 1-3 pages at most.

Second, the context of a chapter in a book is the rest of the book – the chapters that came before it, and the continued development of a topic in later chapters. But one cannot expect that someone is going to read a blog post in the context of other posts that you have written. But since these posts are written for reading in that interactive environment, one can include context by the appropriate use of hyperlinks where one can click on a link to see that context, to delve further into a particular issue, or to see where the facts being quoted come from.

Finally, since one expects that the reader of a blog post is likely to be someone who does not know you, it needs to be kept more impersonal. The reader is not reading it to get to know you, but rather to just quickly get your perspective on a current topic. There are times that a hyperlink to some of your personal background/experiences is ok, but keep it out of the mainline of the posting itself.