Writer vs author (social media)

This is a post about web marketing and how I am working through mine. TL;DR – avoid mistaking writer for author, mistaking content for news.
After taking a social media class at DC’s storied Politics & Prose bookstore with Bethanne Patrick, AKA @TheBookMaven on Twitter, I saw the vibrant risky presence I was in class did not resemble my dour blog.
To say I set about to change that sounds too determined. Really I just read and fussed and internalized a lot and let it jumble. It was on Jason Hough’s website that it coalesced- I wasn’t distinguishing between content and news.
Content is what a writer does – the crafting of words to tell a story or make a case, in forms long and short, measured and free-form, narrative and dramatic and journalistic. My content, here or in other media, belongs in this blog – except that most of my content output is a novel that I can’t share yet. To make up for that I write little flash essays on topics of general interest, or ones related to my novel, working on my rhetorical lay-ups for the day I get to talk intelligently about my book. But they’re content too, not news.
News is what an author needs to provide. An author is the writer’s public presence, built and maintained to engage the public away from the writer’s pages. It stands to reason that an author wants to sell the writer’s books, so some posts are not content but marketing. The author’s own authorship is sometimes a new kind of content, like inspirational quotes and reviews, or even flash essays. The author sometimes needs to provide non-content information, like reading locations, promotions, or contests.
I’ve decided, for me, for now, this blog is mostly going to be about news. You may still see an essay up here from time to time – but I haven’t decided how that will work.
At this writing, my site is half-remade, with a new menu structure leading to many pages under construction.
Thanks for your patience!