What do you mean I have to do SEO for my author blog?

Why can't it just be for fun?

I miss the days of Wordpress blogging, where it was free and we could just blog about whatever we wanted and people could stumble upon it and read it.

It felt more like a little community. Read things that caught our eye. Write about what struck your heart.

These days, I have to think about what people of my genre might type into Google.

Seed that into my work in the most obscure way while trying to sound natural.

Like 'best fantasy books for adults needing to escape the read world' could fit into a H1 title, and H2 subtitle, and three times in the core text naturally...

Then to add it to the images, meta data ...

So stiff. So unnatural.

So boring.

Steals the joy from writing and makes me not want to blog.

And so I haven't much. For such a long time. When I used to love it.

When I visit an author blog, I wanna read snippets of their current work. Snippets of random work that might never make it into a book. Or hints of what they want to work on next. How they thought of it. A recent event they went to. Tips for growing as an author. Random bits about their life.

Personal things.

Authorly things.

Because if I find an author I like the work of, I love how their brain works. Their general thoughts are so interesting.

Like that one time Robin Hobb just posted a picture of soil on her Instagram because she was excited the day she got a new soil delivery for her garden.

No fancy compositions or keywords or marketing nonsense.

Did it work for her because she's already got her audience and she doesn't need to worry about 'author marketing plans' or 'SEO for fantasy books'* or weirding out her audience because we already love her work regardless of what she posts?

*Quote marks used deliberately because that's the sort of weird sh*t we have to type into our blogs for search engines to find us, apparently ...

See, the SEO stuff is so weird.

So, now I thought eff it.

If I want to read that kind of stuff from other authors, then I'll write that.

Brave the no SEO life. Go back to old blogging musings and just write and enjoy it.

SEO and GEO and Google rankings and AI trawling or whatever can be damned, because honestly I don't care about any of that stuff in the first place. I just want to write and enjoy it and find people who like similar kinds of things.

Even for creating. Doing it for the human joy of it. It's so cathartic to get things out of your head and to just write.

And if everything is stealing the joy from us if we do it 'properly', then I'm going to abandon that way and do it the fun way.

Prepare for the chaos brain. And welcome to my gremliny author blog. Subscribe if this is the vibe you like, and let's talk about the real stuff.