: Re: Should I write a companion book/blog? As a spinoff to this question: Incorporating research and background: How much is too much? I'm writing a middle-grade fantasy novel with a historical fiction

@Samaraweera193

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I think, done correctly, a blog could be a tremendous support to your book. Among other things, it could be a selling point for getting the book actually published (publishers like authors to have "platforms" these days). However, as you pointed out, a blog can be a big time-suck, and it needs to be updated at least once a week, or no one will ever read it.

My recommendation would be to go ahead and get a blog account --I strongly recommend wordpress (you can get a free basic account on wordpress.com if you don't have your own hosting). You don't necessarily have to publish any of the entries --you can use it as a useful note-organizing system, with the advantage of categories, tags and dated entries. But if you do get an entry that just needs a little tweak to be publishable, keep a note of it. Then, during the long horrible waiting periods while you're waiting for the book to find an agent or publisher or to come out, you can go back through and convert your notes to publishable entries. You could spend some concentrated time polishing several up at once, and schedule them in advance.

I've had blogs for a long time, and I've used them both as places to workshop new material that might be a book someday, and as an alternate place to publish material that was intended as a book but never sold. I haven't ever seen any huge popularity from any of my blogging, but it does raise your online profile, and it looks good in a query letter. I've even occasionally had people reach out to me because of it, and I once even had someone refer to a bit of my blogged writing in a major venue (the "generic parody" referenced in the opening paragraph).

As far as a companion book, that's really just a way to get double benefit out of your research after your novel is done. As I mentioned, you'll probably have a lot of downtime between finishing the book and seeing it in print.

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