Lurking In The Shadows Of Smartness

Hope everyone had a fantastic Easter holiday. I know I did, which is why there was no post on Sunday.

Now, onto other slices of my life.

Specifically, lurking.

For the past few weeks, I've been lurking around the blog world and the chat room. Not because I'm being anti-social, but because there are few things going on in the blog world and the chat room that I find easier to deal with by lurking around until the things either finish up or I get more comfortable in participating. Since this explanation probably sounds mighty confusing to you, I shall elaborate in my own unique style.

Wait, don't run away screaming. Honest, it won't be that bad this time. I promise. Here, have this fantastic micro brew to enjoy while reading this post. What? Soda is your speed? How 'bout a cold bottle from one of our local bottlers, which I might add, is a thousand times better than the majors. Comfy cozy? Kewl.

Blogs

The major thing going on in the blog world that indirectly affects me is this nifty A-Z challenge that quite a few bloggers are participating in. Since it requires the individual to post something for the next 26 days, it quickly becomes a challenge for the average reader not only to keep up with all the fascinating posts and short stories (yes, one of my blog readers is writing 26 100 word pieces of flash fiction for the A-Z challenge) but to comment on them as well.

Since my blog subscriptions has recently increased by 10%, it now becomes somewhat harder for me to comment on everyone's blog when the posts have increased exponentially due to a cool blogging challenge. Because of that, I'm spending the month of April doing more lurking, more reading, more absorbing of interesting facts and less commenting. So if you don't see me on your blog comments with the usual degree of frequency that you're used to seeing, this is why. Trust me, I still enjoy reading your blog and will be there in the shadows lurking, but for now, comments will appear with a lesser degree of frequency.

As a direct result of these new found blogs, I've had to redo and reorg all my folders, including adding four new sub-folders. I also took the time to actually get a head count of how many blogs I actively subscribe to and read on a daily/weekly basis. As of today, that blog count stands at 110. If you factor in the blogs that I follow which are on hiatus and the blogs that I follow and don't subscribe to, it brings the new total up to 132.

And the main reason as to why my subsciption count is so incredibly high is two fold: One, I found a few neat blogs that were recommended to me, and thus followed and subscribed to, and two, I found a few other blogs via that strange thing called "networking", which I will cover in the next half of the post.

Chat room

Or to be more precise, forum. For the past three weeks, I've been doing a great deal of lurking in the Solstice Publishing writer's forum, which is directly due to the fact that I am sailing in very uncharted waters. While quite a few of my readers out there have a working familiarity with the publishing business, either directly or indirectly, I, by any stretch of the imagination, do not.

So I spend most of my time there reading and learning the ins and out of not only what it takes to publish a book, but how to market and publicize a book as well. I have commented a couple of times, mostly about blogs, since some writers are using the blogging platform to compliment what they use for Twitter and Facebook.

The other day, some of the writers were doing a type of networking called "follow me on my blog and I'll follow you on yours". I said to myself, why not? So I jumped in and started checking out the various writer's blogs that were being offered as links, and within a couple of days, not only did I pick up about five new blogs to read and subscribe to, but I picked up about six new followers in the process.

I'm still feeling my way through the publishing process, but at the very least, I've developed a greater understanding and appreciation on what it takes not only to put out a book but how to market and publicize it as well.

Oh and one more thing, if you're curious about those new blogs, please check out either my "Blogs That I Like To Read" list (because I threw a few new links up), or my follower's list, specifically the first row, as those contain the newest followers of this blog.