Weekly Geeks: Blog Burn Out

This week's Weekly Geeks asks how bloggers deal with blogging burnout. You might not know it, but I blog quite a bit: I have a personal blog, a cool-stuff I found blog, a cool-stuff copied from other blogs blog, a kitschy blog, a collectibles blog, and a few others that I write but don't advertise that they're mine, just as venues to write about things on my mind that I don't care to advertise are going on in my mind. Heck, my list of abandoned blogs is just about as long. With all this blogging going on — and a full-time job, to boot — I can accurately say, yes, I get burned out quite a bit.

So, what do I do?

I take the easy route: I stop blogging. Oh, I can't completely abandon all writing, because Collector's Quest pays me to blog, so I better not fall behind there, and something may suddenly strike my fancy and force me to blog despite my embargo. But this blog and The Infomercantile, both of which have some dedicated followers and some high-profile in-links, each has periodic lulls in which nothing happens. The Infomercantile has been pretty much dormant all summer, with some minor exceptions. It's a research-heavy and scanning-heavy blog, which takes a lot of time; when we've got kids, and the weather is nice, and there's a whole big world out there, who wants to sit at the computer and feed photos into a scanner? From the 10th to the 11th, I was in Minot for work, which took a lot out of me, so last week I didn't blog much at all. Frankly, it's not a big concern.

One thing I learned from a public speaking class a few years ago is that when you stop talking, the listeners' brains stop, too. It's a reason to allow yourself a pause without saying "um" or "uh" for fear of having dead space, or freaking out over having to shuffle your notes a second to figure out where you were. Your listeners don't even register the pause: their listening-bone is locked up, waiting for the next word, and time has ceased to move. Eventually people's brains wake up and realize nothing's happened, but that's a good 10, 20 seconds of time for you, as a speaker, to allow yourself some silence to regroup.

Blogs work the same way. If you're cruising along, posting every day or so, and you've got readers who like what you're putting out, a break will not register with them. Give it a few weeks, eventually they will start to realize, "hey, so-and-so hasn't blogged in a while," but even then it probably won't stop them from checking your blog — that anticipation makes the pause insignificant, because once you start blogging again, they'll start back up reading just as they did before. The probloggers who say, "Update daily! Update hourly! Don't stop to pee, blog's gotta be updated!" are working on the high-volume advertiser-friendly kind of blog. They're not trying to attract readers, they're after eyeballs. Doesn't matter who's looking, as long as they're looking. Their traffic drops precipitously when blogging stops, even for a day. That's not the kind of blog I write: when I stop, it doesn't really register to the reader, not enough to lose the reader. A short pause in blogging to cultivate my sanity doesn't hurt a blog, but it helps my writing overall. When I come back to blogging, there's a spring in my step. By spending my days reading books, going to museums, or doing oft-neglected lawncare, my mind is clean and refreshed and ready to come up with new witty and thoughtful ideas to spread wide and far on the internet.

I do have some other tricks, though: to avoid appearing burned-out, I blog ahead. I generally have several posts scheduled out into the future. If I'm good, posting prodigiously, I'll either fit them in and schedule something else for the future, or just move their scheduled date out further. If you completely walk away from the computer for a week, those pending posts will still trickle out, making it look like you only slowed down instead of stopping. I also don't blog on weekends, usually; it's a schedule people understand, but it's almost a third less content than trying to constantly blog. Both of those help mediate the burn-out feeling, because I have some built-in opportunities to stop blogging without having less of a blog.

Fake Book Covers

Jake is loaded with Young Man's Ennui: his life is full of beer, chocolate, pissing away the workday, and attempts at hipster-friendly self-deprecating dry humor. However, in his spare time (where else could he fit anything in?!?) he uses Photoshop to change photographs into book covers for books that don't exist. He's so proud of his work that he splurged on a domain name and some hand-drawn fonts for quirky cred, but the site hasn't been up long, so there's only a few examples.

As far as what he's got up so far, it's clearly an exercise in trying to produce art by only knowing the outcome without understanding the process, like your uncle Ben plinking on the piano, certain he could write commercial jingles despite his lack of musical training. Not that book covers are that complex, but Jake's results are hit and miss. When they do hit, however, they can be quite good. Many of his fake book-covers fall into the Lulu/PublishAmerica fallacy that overlaying a fancy font is enough to make a cover. When the covers do work, however, Jake stumbles upon some basic design skills, making the font and the structure of the cover work together, like the example above and this one. Those two create intriguing covers that don't explicitly tell anything about the story, but encourage the reader to delve further. In the one above, you wonder, "which one is the painter?" "where are they at?" "why are they walking together, close enough to be friends, but with a respectable 'personal space'?" The image has a lot of lines that tend to intesect between the walker's heads, but the title and subtitle are cock-eyed in a way that their perpendicular lines intersect at the horizon, just above the people's heads; the tall structure of the bridge on the right is balanced on the left by the off-centered walkers — it creates a lot of movement to keep the eye drawn to the cover, which is exactly what you want it to do. While it's not the greatest cover ever made in the world (and, dear god, stop using unnecessary Filters) , it could easily be found on a shelf in Barnes & Noble without wondering, "holy crap, what self-published local leveraged their address to get on one bookseller's shelves?" I'm not saying that Penguin's going to knock on Jake's door any day soon with a design job, but there's legions of freelance book cover designers that are producing crap, so Jake's really not that far off from turning his work-avoiding hobby into a real job.

Print Isn't Dead, It's Different

Reading online is the dissemination and absorption of information -- pleasure reading is like a day at a spa, effortless and engaging. Friend Gracie has had this problem at sex-kitten.net (NSFW, and I designed it), difficulty finding readers online willing to read a couple-thousand word article, but their book sells pretty well. We've long said we won't publish eBooks, because of the pain of reading them online. Short, informational pieces work better online? No wonder newspapers are declining in their corporeal influence.

So, where will long-form writing go? That's why people say print isn't dead - it does something online doesn't do. It is, however, why blogs took off but online magazines haven't -- blogs are easier to read, and easier to write, and the cost is right. Produce something people want in large quantities, for very little cost, and it's a good product.

The Bookshelf Blog

I admit, I've got a lot of stuff bookmarked that I never get around to posting; a lot of them lately have been bookshelves, because I've been loving the design blogs. Now, I don't have to (although, readers who wish I'd post more...sorry): BOOKSHELF is a blog devoted to...bookshelves.



I'm more talky than a lot of other blogs, so I'll probably still link if there's things to say. As an amateur writer, I can't fall into the "post a picture and three words" kind of blogging, which is what disappoints me most about a lot of other blogs. The Bookshelf blog does a good job of compiling, but has sadly little to say. If you love bookshelves so much, wouldn't you want to gush?