Blogging vs. Book Writing

>One of the most common questions I get is “how did you write this book?”. (The most common is actually “how did you get it published?”, but more on that later.)

Steven Johnson has a thoughtful post on the writing side, or specifically, how writing a book and writing a blog are different, and why he has kept the two separate.

My own thought is that two of the keys to writing are persistence and discipline – taking the time out of each day to put some more words down. That’s something that authors and bloggers have in common. But in other ways the two are very different. Blogging is instant gratification – people see what you write immediately and you may get feedback immediately. It’s also a short attention span audience – people follow links from one blog to another, or skim a long list of posts in their aggregator. Book writing is the other side of those coins.

For myself, while writing More Than Human it was a bit of a struggle to focus on the longer term writing project with the lure of blogging or perhaps posting to an email list, but in the end it payed off.