Blog, Social Networking, Marketing and Branding

My first post just went up on the Hyphen magazine blog.

I now officially blog at four blogs:

• Hyphen.
• PAWA, Inc.
• International Exchange for Poetic Invention.
• Poeta y Diwata (AKA this here blog).

I’d actually been stressing a little bit about blogging for Hyphen magazine, because I realized so many of my blogging concerns were not specifically Asian American. This concern never really applied to my blogging at PAWA, where I mostly post event and publication announcements, and link to online book reviews, interviews, submissions calls which would apply to Filipino American artists, and other people’s blog posts.

Additionally, I am not the only Hyphen blogger concerned with American popular culture and where Asian Americans place or find themselves within it, nor am I the only literary person there. I stressed over how to differentiate myself and my contributions. So in the spirit of poet thievery, I’ve decided to try my best to emulate Rigoberto González and his Small Press Spotlights over at the National Book Critics Circle blog. In my case, for purposes of the Hyphen blog, this would be focused on API authors on independent presses. In my first post, I feature Maiana Minahal’s Legend Sondayo.

I’ve wondered if I am spreading myself thin, though I am sure in all of the places I blog, I stick to my concerns: poetics, poetry industry, support of community and independent publishers, writers and authors of color. As well, it is only because I blog in multiple places that I am considering Twittering. The only problem here is having to deal with yet another platform. Blogging in four places means I work in WordPress, Movable Type, and Blogger. So far, WordPress is my platform of choice.

–

Now, as for marketing and branding, if you haven’t already, do read Guy LeCharles Gonzalez’s blog post on “free” and “freemium” here. I don’t know how many of us give our product away for free, though we definitely work at a freemium. Certainly, the blog is part of this. On the blog, we give away free content, discussions of writing process and working in the literary industry. We post poem drafts, and many of us post poems (again though, I take down the poems once I’ve started submitting them to journals). Additionally, we submit poems to online and print magazines and journals, to anthologies. We submit audio and video files of our work. We podcast. We rarely receive payment for any of this, and it’s fine.

We do, however, hope our chapbooks and books sell as a result of the above work. I would like to think that readers of my blog posts and readers, listeners, viewers of my poetry in journals, anthologies, and in performance eventually come to buy my chapbooks and books. If these readers are educators or reading series curators, then this translates into more readers of my books via course adoption, potentially more published critical writing from students, and paying gigs.

Finally, on branding, I understand this to mean that each of us has a niche or certain areas of expertise which we are called upon to represent in arts and academic spaces. I am thinking also of my recently resolved quandary about blogging for Hyphen. What specifically me thing do I bring. I think that’s part of branding. My only question is how to resist pigeonholing, or being so specialized to the point of obscurity. I think it’s this last thing that motivates a lot of folks to be generalists, and I think can even encourage reticence (i.e. I have nothing special to contribute so I won’t contribute anything to the conversation), which to me is a little sad.