April 2006

Basic Blogging on LiveJournal: A Primer
by Martha Wells
www.marthawells.com

Martha Wells is the author of seven fantasy novels, including Wheel of the Infinite, City of Bones, The Element of Fire, and the Nebula-nominated The Death of the Necromancer. Her most recent novels are a fantasy trilogy: The Wizard Hunters, The Ships of Air, and The Gate of Gods, published in hardcover by HarperCollins Eos in November 2005. She has had short stories in the magazines Realms of Fantasy, Black Gate, and Stargate Magazine, and in the anthology Elemental by Steven Savile and Alethea Kontis. She also has essays in the nonfiction anthologies Farscape Forever and Mapping the World of Harry Potter from BenBella Books. She also has a media tie-in novel, Stargate Atlantis: Reliquary coming out in March of 2006. Her books have been published in eight languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian, Italian, Polish, and Dutch.

LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com) is a blogging site, one of the largest, where you can create an online blog or journal. These are very popular with writers now, as they are easily updatable and are very useful for posting information about your appearances, signings, and book releases, as well as articles, opinion essays, or teaser book chapters. They can also be easily integrated with your existing web site. LiveJournal also offers free accounts, though the paid accounts aren't expensive and offer more options.

To define some terms, a "post" is an update to your own Journal, and it will appear on your main Journal page. A "comment" is a reply you make to someone else's post, or that someone makes to your post. A Community is a Journal that multiple users can post to, with one or more users acting as the moderators. There are many writing Communities on LiveJournal, and the two I find most helpful are: GenreNeep for links to posts and discussions about the reading and writing of genre-related material, and SpecficMarkets for science fiction, fantasy and horror writers to exchange market information. In many ways, LiveJournal Communities are just like email mailing lists. Before posting in a Community, it's always a good idea to read the Community Info or Profile page, to make sure your post is in the right format and that it fits the Community's topic.

One reason I chose LiveJournal is that it already has a huge number of members. (There's a LiveJournal post with a list of publishing professionals currently using Live Journal, in order by LiveJournal user id.) It also has large fandom-related Communities, especially for science fiction and fantasy.

The LiveJournal Friends List feature is also very handy. When you add Journals to your Friends list, it creates a Friends page, where the most recent posts from those Journals will be listed. It's a convenient way to read the various Journals you follow in one spot, without having to go to each Journal's home page, and without having to remember to check them.

LiveJournal is also a great place to do research. The Community LittleDetails is specifically for writers needing answers to research questions that they can't find on Google. If you have a large Friends list, you can also ask the people who are reading your Journal for help. I've frequently asked research questions on my Journal and gotten an answer within five minutes.

It's also relatively easy for an experienced user to integrate their LiveJournal with their web site. Even an inexperienced user can change the colors and fonts of their main Journal page to fit in with the style of his or her site. Users tend to like and visit web sites that are updated often, and since your Journal can be updated from any point where you can get access to the internet and a web browser, this makes it easy for you to post quick reports from conventions or other book-related events. You can post news about new sales or releases immediately, without having to update your static HTML pages.

One key to a successful LiveJournal experience is building a good Friends list, and interacting with other users. It helps if you already know current LiveJournal users to add to your Friends list, but also participating in Communities that you are interested in is a good way to find other users whose Journals you might like to read. Also linking to your Journal from your web site, or posting a link to it on your mailing list, is a good way to alert readers to your new Journal.

You can spend as little or as much time on your Journal as you like. One of the best things about the Friends List system is that even if you don't update for a few months, your new post will still show up on the Lists of the various users who have Friended you, letting them know you're back.

One cautionary note: If the purpose of your Live Journal is to advertise or talk about your writing, then you should behave in it the same way you would behave at a real live public appearance. A good rule to live by is to never post anything in it that you wouldn't want quoted back to you at a later date.

Creating a free LiveJournal account is easy. Go to LiveJournal, then select "Create your own Journal" and fill in the information on the next page, which will include the ID and password you would like to use, your birth date (to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act), the type of account (free or paid) that you want, and a letter block to complete to prove that you aren't a spam robot. Once you do that, you're all set and ready to go.

Here's a few more points that the LiveJournal "Frequently Asked Questions" file doesn't really cover, including some LiveJournal etiquette that isn't obvious to the newcomer:

Replying to Comments: When you reply to comments in your post, be sure to select the "reply-to" link in the comment itself. That way the commenter you're replying to will get the reply in email (if he or she has that function turned on) and will know you replied. This helps keep the conversation moving. If a user disables comments on a post, this means they don't want to discuss the content of the post. This doesn't mean go to another unrelated post and comment on it there; it means don't comment on it.

Friending: Most people don't mind if you "Friend" them. It just means they might check out your Journal to see if they want to Friend you back. If someone has a specific Friending policy, it's usually on their info or profile page, which you can see by selecting the "profile" link on their Journal home page, or by clicking on the little person glyph next to their Live Journal ID.

If you lock a post by selecting "Friends" in the security field on the Update Journal page, only the people you have Friended can read that post. That's why you should always be logged on to your LiveJournal account when you read your Friends list, otherwise you may miss locked posts by the people who have Friended you. Some people have Friends-locked journals, so their journals can only be read by users they have Friended.

You should always treat other users' Friends-locked posts as confidential. Don't discuss the content in your own Journal, don't email it to anybody, don't copy it and post it publicly, even if the content seems completely innocuous, or if it's funny and you want to share it. Just don't. People, of course, do occasionally violate this confidentiality, and it causes flame wars and bad feelings.

LiveJournal doesn't notify you if someone Friends your Journal—you'll need to check your Profile page every so often to see if new people have Friended you. I usually log on through the menu on my Profile page, so I always check it then.

Serial Adders: Serial adders are users who will "Friend" a huge number of journals at a time, in order to get attention. Ignore them. You can often distinguish between a Serial Adder, and a user who just happens to have a very large Friends list, by the fact that the Serial Adder's Journal will either be gibberish or have other content intended to be inflammatory. Always remember, if someone Friends your Journal, you don't have to respond to them at all if you don't want to. They will only be able to see your Friends-locked content if you Friend them back.

Icons: Icons are easy. LiveJournal allows you a set number with your account, and stores them for you, so you don't have to have your own web space to store them. You can add them to your account with the "Manage Pictures" menu on your Profile page. Only use icons that you have made yourself, or that are labeled non-exclusive or shared. Some users like to keep the icons they've made for their own exclusive use, others make them to give away and don't care how many people use them. If someone gives you an icon, it's polite to give them credit for making it in the "comment" field when you upload the icon to your Journal.

LJ Cuts: An LJ cut is a command that allows you to hide part of your post, so it's only visible on the Read Comments page and not on your Journal home page. When other users are reading your Journal from their Friends page, they will need to click on the link created by the LJ cut to see the entire post. It's polite to use an LJ cut when posting photos or text entries that are more than a few paragraphs long.

Passwords: Don't give out your Journal password to other online services. There are some services that purport to archive Journal content, with the intent to get access to locked or private posts. The problem is, when you give out your password, you're not only allowing that service access to any Friends-locked or private posts you may have made, you are allowing them access to the locked posts of the users who have "Friended" your journal, violating that tenuous agreement to confidentiality.

Spammers: Spam is any unsolicited commercial advertisement you receive online. Since so many people are now using spam filters for their email, spammers are targeting guestbooks, forums, and any other software that allows users to post comments online. Spammers do haunt LiveJournal, posting spam announcements for online casinos, porn sites, etc. There was an entire spam advertising campaign for the movie The Passion of Christ, for instance. LiveJournal allows you to set a level of security for the comments you will allow for your entire Journal and for each individual post. The security options include disallowing comments or screening comments. When you screen comments, they will only be visible to you until you approve them. Once you approve them, other users can see them. Screening can be a hassle if your Journal gets a lot of comments as people discuss your post or ask questions, so what many people do is select the default options to disallow anonymous comments (comments from users who do not have a LiveJournal account) and to log the IP address of all users who leave comments. This discourages most spammers.

For more technical information, visit the LiveJournal Frequently Asked Questions page. My ID on Live Journal is marthawells, and my Journal can be found at www.marthawells.com/blog.shtml