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Writers Don’t Get to Collaborate Like Musicians

I envy musicians. Not just because they play music and entertain millions of people. Not just because they can spend hours and hours doing something they love, breaking silence with something that’s beautiful or joyful. Not because they can create magic with their instruments. (OK, yes, that. I learned bass guitar for a year during the pandemic, but haven’t touched it for several months.)

I envy them for their collaboration and support. I am jealous of the way that just a few talented musicians can get together, play for a couple hours, and make something that no one has ever heard. I’m jealous of the way they can swap out people and make something even differenter than the thing they did before. (Yes, I know that’s not a word. That’s something I can do that musicians can’t.)

This week, I listened to Justin Richmond interview Johnny Mathis on the Broken Record podcast. My mom loved Johnny Mathis, and we listened to his Christmas albums every year when I was a kid, so I didn’t want to miss this one.

In the interview, Johnny — Mr. Mathis — talked about how when he first went to New York, he visited jazz clubs to watch musician friends perform and that they would often ask him to go up on stage and sing with them. Or how he worked with other musician friends on different projects, singing on their records, or inviting them to sing on his.

Mathis was able to perform with whomever and wherever he had the opportunity. And he was able to choose who he wanted to work with, and the result was something unique and beautiful and was enjoyed by people all around the world, like my mom. It was this collaboration and cooperation that made him one of the most popular singers and artists of the 20th century.

Raspberry Pie (That’s my son on the right).
A little closer to home, I watch my son play bass guitar in a few different bands around Central Florida. He gets asked to play fairly frequently because there’s a shortage of good bass players, and because they know he’ll do a good job for them.

At some of his performances, the band leader will sometimes ask a musician friend to join them on stage for a song or two. Or he’ll participate in an improv jazz session with some friends, and the performance will be so seamless, it’s as if they had practiced together for hours and hours.

I envy musicians for their collaboration and ability to just slip into someone else’s ensemble. As long as they know what they’re doing, it’s seamless, and you wouldn’t know they hadn’t always been there.

Music is all about relationships. Not just the notes between rhythm and melody, but in finding people you can mesh with and trust. As long as they’ve got the skills and you can depend on them, you can make some excellent music together. You can even record that and share it with the entire world, or play it in front of a live audience of one person or 50,000 people all at once.

Writers don’t get to collaborate

Writers don’t get to collaborate, not in that way. Writing is a solitary event. You do it alone, and no one is there to help. It’s hours and hours of writing and editing, but no one is looking over your shoulder to give advice. No one is typing on one half of the keyboard while you type on the other. No one is laying down a funky verb line while you dance around a noun melody with a staccato punctuation drum beat keeping the rhythm.

Right now, I’m sitting in a local coffee shop writing this, and no one is helping me. They’re off in their own little solo performances, tapping away at a laptop, looking at their phone, or reading a book. One guy next to me is writing in a small notebook. (God bless the pen-and-notebook people.)

Oh, sure, you can have editors or fellow writers pore over your work and make it better. But they pore over it alone, give it back to you, and then you go off by yourself and fix it. Then you can share it with the world, where it’s read by one person or 50,000 people all at once.

But you don’t receive real-time feedback as people read your book. You’ll never experience a room full of people all reading your book at the same time, cheering at the good parts or applauding at the end of each chapter.

Working together isn’t really collaboration. Not like musicians do.

There are three ways writers can work together on a project, but I wouldn’t call it true collaboration.

  • Split the project in half and work on it. Like, dividing up chapters of a book and writing them individually — like Kyle Lacy and I or Jason Falls and I did on our books. You may be working together, but it’s not an ensemble, it’s a group of individuals all working at different times.
  • Share a Google Doc and write in the same document at the same time. Jason and I did that in the first chapter of No Bullshit Social Media. We decided we hated it and never did it again. I would hate to try to do this with several writers at once.
  • Sit in a room full of other writers and shout out ideas while one person writes them all down. This is how writers rooms work, especially for comedies, and I would dearly love to be in one of those for a day. This is the closest to real collaboration, but even then, each line comes from a single person and is improved on by other individuals. Sure, they piggyback off each other, but they’re not making music.

But those opportunities are rare. Or, in the case of the Google Docs thing, terrible.

So writers are left to their own devices and can’t collaborate to make beautiful work in the same way musicians do. And for that, I envy them.

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Book Authors, Your Publisher Will Not Handle Your Book Publicity for You. Only You Will.

A few days ago, I spoke with two different people who were ready to publish their very first book. They wanted to know how to find a publisher that would handle their book publicity for them.

“Oh, your publisher won’t promote your book for you,” I said.

“Really? I thought the publisher handled all of that!”

“No, not at all. Unless your last name is Grisham or Patterson, your publisher won’t do shit for you.*”

* (Technically, that’s not true. Your publisher handles all editing, page layout, and cover design. You pay for that if you self-publish.)

It’s inescapable: When you write a book, you need to do your own promotion, or you need to hire someone to do it for you. Your publisher won’t do it, your agent won’t do it, your friends won’t do it. (Hell, they’ll barely buy your book!)

And people will not flock to your book just because you wrote it.

Your book may be great, but no one will care.

That’s because there are close to 1 million books published in the US each year. And if you count self-published books, that number is closer to 4 million.

Also, if you do manage to find a publisher, there’s only a 1% chance that your book will reach a bookstore.

Out of the 1 million books published this year, only 10,000 will make it to a bookstore. (My last edition of Branding Yourself was not placed in Barnes & Noble, even though they carried the last two editions plus my other book, No Bullshit Social Media. My publisher said Barnes & Noble just wasn’t a viable partner for them anymore. One of the biggest biz-tech publishers in the country, and they no longer worked with Barnes & Noble.)

So, your book is not going to magically sell just because you wrote it. If it did, we’d all be rich.

Which means you need promotion and publicity.

But your publisher is publishing dozens, if not a few hundred, books per year. Do you think they have the time to devote to your book and ignore all the others?

Absolutely not. If your publisher can put any weight behind the promotional efforts, it will be a few hours of sending a generic press release to all the same media outlets, blogs, and podcasters they send all other book announcements to. And then it’s on to the next book. And the next one. And the next one. And soon, your book is forgotten along with all the others they just promoted.

In fact, when you submit your book proposal or manuscript to a publisher, they’ll want to know the size of your social media footprint and newsletter subscription list. And if it’s not “a lot,” then they won’t publish you. It doesn’t matter if your book is the second coming of Confederacy of Dunces, they will give you a hard pass.

Which means you’re on your own.

Which means — and I cannot stress this enough — you need to do your own book publicity.

Let me say that again but in a bigger font.

You need to do your own book publicity!

If you don’t do it yourself, your book will not get promoted.

Oh sure, you could pay someone to do it, but you won’t get good publicity for less than a few thousand dollars per month.

It’s a question of time versus money: If you don’t have the time, then you need to pay someone to do it. If you don’t have the money, then you need to do it yourself.

Without explaining how to do it all (because there are several good books on the subject (affiliate link)), your publicity efforts should include:

  • An email newsletter campaign.
  • A social media campaign (Twitter and/or Facebook, plus maybe TikTok).
  • A book reviewer/blogger campaign.
  • A podcast interview campaign.
  • A paid online advertising campaign.
  • An email-your-friends campaign. (Email each of them, one at a time, ask them to buy.)
  • A convention/conference campaign.

You don’t have to do all of these things, but you need at least two of them — the first two — because they’re the easiest, they can be automated and scheduled, and they’re free. (Sign up for Mailchimp or Moosend; they have free starter options.)

I don’t care if you hate social media. I don’t care if you don’t know how to do an email newsletter. I don’t care if you hate having to email 200 book bloggers one at a time.

You have to do it. You have to do it. You have to do it.

Because your book won’t sell otherwise. Period, end of sentence.

Otherwise, your book will be the greatest thing you’ve ever done that no one will ever know it. You’ll sell it to a few friends and family members, and your partner will secretly buy three copies and give them to friends. But it will be just a tiny drop in 4-Million-Books-Published-Each-Year Ocean.

So let me say it again, but in red: You need to do your own book publicity!

“But I don’t like social—”

I don’t care. Get over yourself.

“But I don’t know how—”

I don’t care. Figure it out.

“But I don’t have the ti—”

I don’t care. Make the time.

“But I—”

Knock, knock.

“Who’s there?”

I don’t care. Do you know who else doesn’t care?

Everyone!

You need to do book publicity to make them care. You need to promote your book until you’re sick of it. And then you need to promote it some more. And when you think everyone else is sick of it, promote it some more.

Bottom line: You’re going to spend 90% of your time writing your book. And you’re going to spend the other 90% promoting it.

Because if you don’t do it, no one else will. No one will care as much as you. No one is invested as much as you.

You can either pay someone to do it, and they won’t spend as much time on it as you want.

Or you can suck it up and do it yourself.

Because your publisher will not promote your book for you.

Final note

All of this is not to discourage you into giving up or not seeking publication. You absolutely should. Submit to agents and publishers and get your book out into the world. You deserve to be published! People should read your work. Just be aware that your work is not done once you write The End. It’s only beginning.

Photo credit: Dimhou (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Questions About Personal Branding for the Writing Workshop of Chicago

A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Writing Workshop of Chicago about personal branding secrets for authors. We had a great question-and-answer period at the end, but we ran out of time before we ran out of questions.

So the organizer and fellow humor writer, Brian Klems, forwarded the questions to me and I decided to answer them in a blog post. This way, he can refer all the attendees to this page and there’s a permanent location for the questions. But more importantly, I’ll get a bump in web traffic.

First, Yvonne asked, “Are Facebook author pages useful?”

Yes, they are, for a couple of reasons. One, a lot of your readers are on Facebook and it’s easy to point them to that page. Second, it gives you more privacy because you don’t have to be Facebook friends with your readers. You don’t necessarily want them to see your personal stuff, so an author’s page is a great way to do that.

However, keep in mind that Facebook limits the reach of its pages in the hopes that you’ll pay to boost your different posts. Depending on what you write, you might be better off creating a group about your books or topic. Groups updates are not throttled the way a page’s updates are, plus you can encourage more discussion among your readers.

But don’t let the Facebook page/group be your main hub of activity. Try to have a writer’s blog/website as your central hub and treat Facebook and other networks as the spokes.

Maria asked, “I’d always heard you should not post the same things on your various social media channels, so you give people an incentive to follow you in different areas. Your thoughts?”

That’s mostly true. One thing to keep in mind is that people will not see all your social messages. That is, my readers don’t see what I post on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at the same time. People have their preferred social networks and probably won’t go to the others just to find you.

Having said that, you can take advantage of each network’s format to post your best message. You get 280 characters on Twitter, but you get 2,200 on Instagram. You may want to cram several #hashtags into a tweet, but stick them in the first comment on Instagram.

If you want to do simple things like sharing Instagram photos to Twitter and Facebook, you can automate that with Zapier or If This Then That. You can set it up so when you post a photo to Instagram, it will automatically be shared to Twitter and Facebook. That’s a real time saver. But if you want to have separate and distinct messages, you can either do it one at a time, or you can use a service like Loomly to post from a single dashboard. You can also use HootSuite, but it costs nearly $50 per month, compared to Loomly’s $26 per month. Which makes me think doing it one network at a time is ideal for most writers.

David wanted to know, “How important in LinkedIn for authors?”

That depends. It’s critical for business/non-fiction authors, not so much for fiction writers. You can find readers on LinkedIn, even if you’re a scifi/romance/mystery writer, but it’s going to be difficult to find them since most people go there looking for work-related content.

If you only have a limited amount of time and energy to focus on one or two social networks, stick with the ones that are going to do you the most good. LinkedIn won’t be that unless you’re writing business-related books.

Howard wondered, “What do you think about #BookTok on TikTok?”

Honestly, I haven’t watched it enough to have a strong opinion about it, but I will say that anyone who’s talking about books is doing important work, and they’re finding thousands of fans.

There are several channels/creators who have gotten very popular on TikTok talking about writing and books. So if you want to join their ranks, go for it. TikTok has become an important platform for a lot of people, mostly Gen Z, so you should take advantage of that.

Clare asked, “How does your intended audience shape how you brand yourself? For example, I write middle grade fantasy.”

That’s a great question, Clare, and almost worth its own blog article, if not an entire book!

Remember, a brand is an emotional response people have to our face and our name. (Or if you’re a company, the emotional response to your name and logo.) When you think about brands like McDonald’s, Nike, BP, or the Chicago Cubs, people have an emotional response to them. They love them or hate them.

So the emotional responses our readers have become our brand. We can shape and hone that brand ourselves, but ultimately, we’re not responsible for how people perceive us. We can do all sorts of great work and people’s emotional response can be “Yay!” “Ugh!” or “Meh.”

Having said all that, you should treat your personal brand almost like a persona or a character you play. That’s not to say you should lie about who you are. Rather, your personal branding efforts should match what your readers and fans expect of you.

If you’re a middle-grade fantasy writer, the kinds of things you share on social media should be about middle-grade fantasy subjects: swords, dragons, wizards, etc. It’s not really the place to write at length about the supply chain crisis or your thoughts on the January 6 hearings. You can do that elsewhere, but not on your author profiles because it doesn’t match what your readers want.

On the other hand, if you’re a political/current events writer, you don’t necessarily want to share your cosplay photos from Dragon Con.

So, in that sense, your audience shapes your personal branding efforts because you should give them what they want.

Cindi wanted to know, “Do you use some of the new social media platforms, Locals, Rumble, Spotify, and Truth Social?”

Not really. For one thing, there are thousands of social networks these days, compared to the few dozen there were when I first started doing all this in 2007. So I can’t even keep up if I wanted to.

Having said that, I’m not against using a new social network, and I’ve joined a few but I never stick with them. However, I’m always on the lookout for new alternatives to the ones I use now. Is there a new Twitter alternative? Where should I go if Facebook collapses? Is there something better than LinkedIn?

Ultimately, if I can find a network that looks like it won’t fail, doesn’t depend on rocket-like growth just to survive, and lets me quickly and easily post updates (this is one reason I haven’t gotten into TikTok yet), I’ll use it.

And finally, Mandy put a smile on my face when she said, “@erik awesome stuff (no question) :-)”

Thank you, Mandy! I appreciate it. I always have a great time speaking to the Writing Workshop classes.

If you have any other personal branding questions, just drop them in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer them. Thank you to everyone who came to the event, and I look forward to seeing you soon.

Taken from “10 Personal Branding Secrets for Authors” by Erik Deckers”

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Don’t Worry If You Write Similar Articles: 5 Reasons Why You Should

Sometimes when I’m working with clients, I’ll write similar articles with topics that overlap in one or two ways. They cover nearly the same topic. Or they use some of the same keywords. Or they cover two different solutions that solve the same problem. Or two different problems that can be fixed with the same solution.

The clients will often want to scrub the similar articles, worried about the overlap.

“It’s fine,” I tell them. “It doesn’t matter if we have overlap. In fact, we want them to overlap, and here’s why.”

And then I lay out concise, logical reasons about why you should write similar articles for content marketing purposes.

Your readers are not reading every article.

People come to your website because they’re looking for a particular solution, or because they came in on a single Google search. When they come, they’ll read the article they need and then they’ll leave again. They don’t poke around looking for similar articles, and even if they find them, they won’t suddenly abandon their quest for your product.

“Oh, crap! I was all set to spend six figures on this solution, but these jerks wrote two somewhat similar articles!”

Sounds silly, doesn’t it? That’s because it doesn’t happen. And if people do find two similar articles, they may read them both, which is what will ultimately drive them down your sales funnel.

People are using different keywords or phrases to find you

Your website should rank for different keywords; those keywords will bring different people to different blog articles and landing pages. They search for different keywords because they have different questions or different problems. You can’t just write one blog article or one landing page and expect it to do everything for everyone.

Your readers are not looking for the same exact thing, which means they can be served by slightly different articles.

Years ago, I had a client that manufactured different attachments for skid steer loaders (e.g. Bobcat). Among their 200+ attachments, they made snow plows, snow pushers, and snow blowers.

And so we wrote different articles about why they needed plows over pushers, pushers over blowers, blowers over plows. And then we wrote the reverse articles: pushers over plows, blowers over pushers, plows over blowers.

Why?

Because different people came to the site for different reasons; we had to write the articles that would tell them what they needed to know. They came in looking for a particular keyword in relation to a particular question — “Do I need a snow plow or a snow pusher?” “Do I need a snow pusher or a snow blower?” People didn’t have identical questions, so we couldn’t give them a single, one-size-fits-all answer.

Our job was to answer that particular question, no matter what they were looking for. So we created slightly similar articles to do just that. The end result is the client saw a significant increase in sales because everyone could find the infomration they needed.

People come to you via different paths.

Sometimes people find you because of social media, not SEO. That means you should be tweeting and sharing your articles several times in one week. When I publish my humor columns, I tweet the link three times on Friday, three on Saturday (including 3 AM), and once on Sunday and Monday. I also publish it on Facebook and LinkedIn (when appropriate). I do it because all my followers aren’t eagerly awaiting my next column, racing to read it by 9 AM on Friday morning.

My readers are on social media at different times of day — morning Twitter readers are not necessarily afternoon Twitter readers. And the 3 AM readers are probably in the UK and Europe, or they have severe insomnia.

More so, most people don’t see any article I post, which means I can’t count on my audience to see every single thing I’m posting. Still, I need to give them several opportunities to find it, so I need to share it more than a few times.

That may happen with your readers as well. A reader who catches your latest tweet about your latest article may have missed the hundreds of tweets you’ve sent over the past several months. And it’s the only one they’re going to see. But another reader saw your article from three months ago and they missed this new one completely.

Both articles may have been slightly similar, but each reader only saw one article, so they each may need to cover some of the same material. There are a few major points you need to stress over and over, not because you want to beat people over the head with them, but because everyone is arriving at different times to different landing pages.

People don’t remember what you said three weeks ago.

You’ve heard that people need 6 – 8 marketing touches before they make a buying decision. Which means it probably doesn’t hurt that they hear some of that information 6 – 8 times just to remember it.

And we don’t retain the information we’ve read very well, especially when we read on our mobile phones and laptops. (We retain information gleaned from paper reading better.)

That means people aren’t going to remember what you wrote in your blog article three weeks ago, so it’s OK to remind them of it once in a while. In fact, the more you remind them, the more likely they’re going to remember it as they make their buyer’s journey.

IT’S FOR SEO. NOT EVERYTHING IS FOR YOU!

Given everything else I’ve said up to this point, the most important thing is that you’re writing articles for Google.

Now, before all the content marketers start jumping up and down on me with hob-nailed boots, I am NOT saying that you should write for bots over people. I want you to do the opposite of that at all times.

But what I am saying is that you cannot ignore the bots. People will come and people will go, but these bots will be around forever. They’ve been crawling my first blog since 2003, they’ve been crawling this blog since 2009. But my readers? I doubt very much that I have any readers from 2009, let alone 2003. But Google has certainly been around since then, and they’ve been tracking my SEO for the last 19 and 13 years.

That means I need to keep the bots happy and give them plenty of rich content with the right keywords, images, videos, and so on.

And yes, I absolutely need to write for my human readers. They take top priority in all the work I do. I need to write well, I need to be interesting, I need to be relevant, and I need to be entertaining.

But I can do that and still incorporate the right SEO tricks to keep Google happy. I can walk and chew gum at the same time.

One of those tricks is to write multiple articles with topics that may overlap from time to time. It doesn’t mean to write identical articles, or to even write articles that are 50% different from the previous article. (A common SEO cheat is to rewrite articles so they’re at least 25% different and post them in different places to make Google think they’re two different articles.)

It means knowing that different people will read different articles at different times. It means publishing interesting, well-written pieces that provide some sort of value — education, information, entertainment, etc.

But the bottom line is that while you’re writing for those people, you must write for the bots as well. You can do that and still sound human when you do it.

If you can’t, then hire a professional who can. We’re the ones who know how to write for the bots in such a way that the humans will never know.

And vice versa.

If you’d like to learn more about writing for search while writing for people, let us know. We’d be happy to tell you more.

Photo credit: Bob Adams from George, South Africa (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 2.0)

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Marketers, Put Analogies, Similes, and Metaphors to Work for You

What’s the difference between metaphors, similes, and analogies? Not a lot, unless you’re a word nerd like me.

Short answer: Metaphors describe an idea; similes do the same, but use “like” or “as.” Analogies are that mystery comparison that we all pretend to know what it means, but we really think it’s a simile.

Ann Handley recently wrote in her Total Annarchy newsletter about the importance of analogies.

In Marketing, analogies pack a lot in a tiny overhead bin space.

They can help us explain convoluted ideas or applications more simply. They can help our audiences understand what we do or what we sell.

And (important!) analogies can help us be more memorable.

When it comes to writing, there are three types of analogies we can use. And they’re so similar, they’re easy to get confused. Hell, I wrote this article, and I’m still not entirely clear on what they mean!

Metaphors:

A metaphor compares two things, one to the other, but doesn’t use the words “like” or “as.” They’re more powerful and almost make a strong commitment to the comparison.

As George Savile once said, “Men’s words are bullets that their enemies take up and make use of against them.”

Or William Shakespeare in As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.”

Did you see it? Men’s words are bullets. They’re not like bullets, they ARE bullets. And all the men and women (are) merely players. Not like, are.

Metaphors tend to be more poetic and you can create greater imagery with them.

They’re also morally superior to similes. (More on that in a minute.)

Similes:

The weasel word of the comparison game! I’m not a fan of similes because they are weaker than metaphors. The big difference between a simile and a metaphor is the words “like” or “as.”

“Life is like a box of chocolates,” Forrest Gump famously said. He didn’t want to commit to the image, so he said it’s only like a box of chocolates.

Weasel!

Similes compare two unlike items in order to create meaning at a deeper level. “My love is like a red, red rose, That’s newly sprung in June,” said Robert Burns.

If I were Mrs. Burns (Jean Armour), I’d be worried about that relationship: He can’t commit to a metaphor, but he’s going to commit to you?

(Burns was also a noted philanderer, so this should have been a clue to Armour.)

Other similes include “as blind as a bat,” “as clumsy as an ox,” and “like watching paint dry.”

Analogies:

Part metaphor, part simile, all argument. That is, an analogy is a type of argument or explanation that compares two items but in relation to each other as a way to explain one of the items.

“Our latest company reorganization is about as useful as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” or “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.” (E.B. White)

But They All Look the Same.

Of course, when you really look at it, it’s hard to make a distinction between analogies and similes. Are similes the shorter aphorisms? “As blind as a bat” and “clumsy as an ox?” And are phrases like “Watching the play was like watching paint dry” analogies because they’re longer?

As I was researching this piece, I found article after article that mixed up the use of these three terms. But I found one explanation that seemed to explain the difference. As Robert Lee Brewer, senior editor of Writer’s Digest, said,

A metaphor is something, a simile is like something, and an analogy explains how one thing being like another helps explain them both.

See? Clear as mud.

Basically, the three terms can be used almost interchangeably and you could argue for days about whether “Life is like a box of chocolates” is a simile or an analogy.

<One of my favorite albums of all time is Tom Waits’ Nighthawks At The Diner, and I especially love the song, “Putnam County”. In it, Waits says the following verse.

And the impending squint of first light
And it lurked behind a weepin’ marquee in downtown Putnam
Yeah, and it’d be pullin’ up any minute now
Just like a bastard amber Velveeta yellow cab on a rainy corner
And be blowin’ its horn in every window in town

There, Waits uses a combination of metaphors and similes as a way to describe the morning sunlight banging on your windows after a hard night’s drinking. And you can see how he uses the devices for a most-powerful effect.

Regardless, the easy thing to remember is that similes (and analogies) use “like” or “as” and metaphors do not.

That makes metaphors more powerful and morally superior, but we’ll argue about that later.

Photo credit: CarbonNYC (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 2.0)

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Five Terrible Ways to Start a Blog Article and Five Good Ways

As a content writer, I cringe and writhe in pain when I see some content marketers’ openings — ledes, in journalism parlance — of their blog posts and journal articles. They’re cheap, amateurish, and they say absolutely nothing. They’re terrible ways to start a blog article, and they can wreck what might have been an otherwise good piece.

They’re so overused and hackneyed, I’m just embarrassed for them.

It’s one thing if they tried this lede in college and got a warm, squishy feeling about it, but the problem is no one told them not to do it again, and so they stuck with it.

Wait, wait! What’s a “lede?”

Lede (pronounced “leed”) is the intentional spelling of the word lead. However, you don’t always know how “lead” is pronounced until you know its context.

According to newspaper legend, reporters — whose stories were cast in lead (“led”) type — wanted to avoid confusion with the opening lines to their stories. And so people wouldn’t get confused and say lead instead of lead. Since they wrote a lead that was cast in lead, they needed to signify the difference. So they started using “lede” to mean the opening paragraph (“graf”) and “lead” to mean the soft metal.

But that’s not what you came here for.

The Five Terrible Ways to Start a Blog Article

1. Let’s face it.
I hate this one because it feels forced and we have to reluctantly accept what life has done to us. Like you and I have been going around and around trying to find our way out of a Locked Room game, and we don’t have the first clue to get out.

I’ll almost buy using this phrase near the end of an article, but not at the beginning.

2. Unless you’ve been under a rock.
I overheard someone use this on an anime podcast recently, talking about an anime movie that I had never even heard of. Basically, unless I had been living under a rock, I would know about this whole big kerfuffle surrounding this movie I’d never heard of.

This lede is actually rude because it insinuates your reader is a moron.

“Only a true moron wouldn’t know about this thing I’m about to tell you.”

My response to these is rude and vulgar, so I won’t repeat it.

3. The recipe lede.
“Take three part X, two parts Y, and one part Z, mix them together and you’ve got [insert story theme].” Blurg!

This one is hackneyed and overused. It works in nearly every situation, which means it’s not good for any of them. Gag me with a mixing spoon.

4. The high school research paper.
This is the one that gets directly to the point in the most boring way possible, usually as a way to shoehorn keywords into the opening paragraph.

“Most businesses need an accounting and bookkeeping system. Keeping track of your finances is the most important job for any business, and accounting software will help you do this.”

Sure, it’s factual, it’s to the point, and it’s so dull, it couldn’t cut through water.

A better lede might start with, “Entrepreneurs, do you remember when you started your business and all your invoices were done in Word and you hammered together some kind of balance sheet on Excel?” See the difference?

5. Statistics.
“There are 7 million blog articles published every day.”

You could lump this one with the high school paper lede. It’s informative, but it’s not exciting. I might appreciate that fact (which is true), but it doesn’t pull me into the story with any emotion. If you want me to care, tell me about one of those bloggers, not all 7 million of them.

Also, clicking that link takes you a real stinker of a lede — it’s written only for SEO purposes, and if I wasn’t promised a raft full of blogging stats, I wouldn’t read a word more of it:

“This article will reveal the most interesting blogging stats, facts, and trends. And answer the most common questions.”

Blurg!

The Five Good Ways to Start a Blog Article

So how should you start a blog article if you want it to be effective and interesting?

1. The Hard News Lede This actually is a boring way to start a story, but it’s soooo much better than any of the ones I mentioned above. Go look at a newspaper’s website and read some of the articles in their News section. They’ll all start with the hard news lede.

In this kind of lede, you answer the 5 W’s and 1 H: Who, what, where, when, why, and how. (Sometimes called the 6 W’s, where the how is replaced with “what significance.”)

Here’s an example:

“John Smith was shot as he tried to stop a hold-up attempt at KFC at 1234 Main Street at 12:38 pm. He was taken to Polk Memorial Hospital and listed in stable condition.”

You’ve got all 5 W’s and the H in that first sentence. (I just threw in the second sentence so you’d know John was OK. He appreciates your well-wishes.)

It’s not exciting, but it’s informative and well-done.

2. The “Features” Lede
The news lede is boring, but the features lede is much more interesting. In fact, features stories tend to be much more interesting than hard news stories.

“All John Smith wanted was a bucket of chicken. What he got was a trip to the hospital and a bullet wound to the thigh.”

They look at the Why of most news stories in general — this is where you find the interesting details about a news story. Investigative reporting happens here. Sports features happen here. Human interest. Historical stories. Social/community stories.

For a look at a great lede in a Pulitzer-winning story, check out the Tampa Bay Tribune’s Insane. Invisible. In Danger. stories, written by Leonora LaPeter Anton, Anthony Cormier, and Michael Braga.

3. Telling a story.
I don’t mean a long, meandering, 4-volume epic about Memaw’s Potato Salad preceding the actual recipe. But a nice 100-word story that builds tension or sets the stage for the information you’re about to impart.

Content marketers like to call themselves “storytellers,” yet they fail to tell a single story in all of their writing. I don’t mean just tell a story like, “That time I got lost in a foreign city with my dad.” You can tell brief stories to set the stage to a bigger idea. Story #3 in the Tampa Bay “Insane. Invisible. In Danger.” series does that in just seven grafs. Surely you can do that!

4. Look, stupid!
Now, let me stress that I do not recommend that you actually start a blog article with this phrase.

Rather, this is a great way to kick off an article when you’re stuck for a starting point. I’ve used this to kick off many how-to and informative articles. I could have started this article with:

“Look, stupid!

“Writing the opening of a blog article isn’t that hard, but that doesn’t mean you can be lazy about it. You need to grab your reader from the very first words, which means you can’t just phone in the lede.”

I write “Look, stupid!” then write the lede, and then go back and delete those first two words. The opening gets me exasperated with the reader and I can adopt an “I-love-you-but-you’re-killing-me-Smalls” tone. The lede is forceful, direct, and gets straight to the point.

5. The mystery.
Build a mystery with your opening and promise to solve it for the reader sometime before the end. Make sure the mystery is enticing — you can help that along by telling a story — and that the payoff is worth it.

“I remember going on a road trip with a friend in college. We drove 1,000 miles west with no real destination in mind and no idea what we would find. We just knew we wanted to leave Indiana for a week. What we found — and who we picked up on the way — changed our lives and sent us careening off the carefully-laid plans our parents had made for us.”

Isn’t that exciting? Don’t you want to know where we went, what we found, and who we picked up? I’ll bet that if I started a blog post that way, you’d gobble up the entire article trying to find out all the answers to the questions.

Unfortunately, it’s here at the end of the piece, and I’ve run out of time, so I guess you’ll never know.

(Just kidding. I made that stuff up.)

There are already 7 million blog articles being published each day, so there’s no point in trying to match the same level of boring mediocrity as everyone else. Stop using those bad ledes to start a blog article, because they’re just making your work sound terrible. A good blog post starts with a good lede and builds from there.

Write great ledes and the rest will follow.

Photo credit: Creative_Tomek (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)