I've just passed the six month mark as the Sunday blogger for Dead Guy and, if you will indulge me, I'd like to take this opportunity to reflect on the experience. As someone new to blogging, it took only a couple of months for me to realize that the hardest part of blogging is not the actual writing, but the part where you have to come up with ideas that are worth writing about week after week after week. If you look back on my my posts for the past six months, you can pretty much track the ebb and flow of my inspiration, such as it is. So it was that a couple of weeks ago, when I felt myself scraping the absolute bottom of the idea barrel, I reminded myself that I had been invited to join Dead Guy so that I could provide a librarian's point of view. Hence, the appearance on February 13 of Ten Misperceptions about Public Libraries.
I didn't realize right away what was going on. I had been told that Dead Guy averaged about 200 views a day which was certainly the most exposure that my writing had ever gotten, save for the occasional letter to the editor and a couple of op-ed pieces that managed to find their way into our local weekly and not counting my routine library press releases. After my first post back in August, I received a flurry of welcoming responses but soon fell into a pattern of receiving only one or two comments per week, if I received any at all.
Two weeks ago, however, was different. After the initial flurry of responses that came my way that Sunday, my comment count had reached the upper teens by late Wednesday. As unusual as this was, what took me completely by surprise was the fact that my Facebook "likes" count was hovering somewhere around 857, something that I had never even bothered paying attention to before.
In an attempt to solve this little mystery (this is a mystery writers blog, after all), I googled Ten misperceptions about public libraries and felt a healthy shiver of ego gratification wriggle through my body as I saw that, not only had my post made its way to such illustrious blogs as NBC Action News, the American Library Association, and Library Journal, but that it had also found its way to a number of other blogs dedicated to libraries and librarians. I was more than a little astonished to see that it had also been picked up by blogs that targeted various categories of genre writing including romance and science fiction, as well as some other blogs beside Dead Guy that are devoted to crime fiction. Although I can not find the exact location where it is embedded, there is also evidence that Ten Misperceptions even made it onto the Huffington Post (very, very cool).
As I continued to click my way through the google list, a link to a site called twitoaster revealed that, by February 14, my post had been twittered or retweeted just under 3,800 times. By lunchtime on February 18, Ten misperceptions about public libraries reached 1,000 "likes" on Facebook, after which the counter apparently stopped counting. By the weekend, I saw evidence that my post had gotten someone's attention in such far flung places as London, Dublin, Brazil and Indonesia. On the following Sunday, I had the pleasure of checking my library email account and finding an email that included a link to (you guessed it) Ten misperceptions about public libraries. It had been sent to me through a listserv that is subscribed to by hundreds of New Jersey librarians; it was sent by a librarian I do not know and who probably had no clue that he and I work only about 25 miles away from each other. Finally, on Tuesday, I emailed one of my librarian friends to tell her about my blogging experience only to have her respond that she had seen Ten misperceptions earlier in the week and had herself passed it on to other librarians without knowing that I was the person who had written it.
Maybe for you writers out there this is pretty standard stuff, but for me it's been a pretty heady experience. It's been a learning experience too, but it has also evolved into something of a cautionary tale. There will be more about that over the next week or two.
Also, does anyone know a good synonym for "flurry"?
