The snob in me has always felt that the casual, rough-draft nature of personal- or promotional-blogging was a bit beneath published authors—or at least the "serious" ones—who have spent months or years painstakingly creating their books, only to start a blog in which they vent insidery frustrations (Keith Gessen!) or post breathless blow-by-blow accounts of how that manuscript is coming along.

Example: NYT reporter Jennifer 8. Lee's blog post from last year, in which she sighed in relief that "the manuscript does not suck" by re-printing a gushy e-mail from her editor.

Blogging can also be a colossal time-suck for a writer, unless writin' a blog is your job. But as publishing insiders will tell you, it's all a part of branding—and maybe even selling books!

Galleycat weighs in further: it's actually not such a bad idea if you do it right:

"Blogging isn't an end, but a means to an end—just one tool (and not always the best one) that you can use to spread the message that you are (or you publish) an interesting person who has something to say about the human condition worth paying attention to.

If you can't bring yourself to do that, you need to step back and consider some very fundamental questions about why you want to be a writer or a publisher. It would be great if we could just drop a book on the table and expect everyone to be bowled over by its intrinsic rightness—but we all know that's not going to happen. So we've got to go out into the world, and present our authentic selves in such a manner that what we have to say will resonate with others when they come across us in their own wanderings.

Well. Blog carefully, everyone!

[Galleycat]