Just come from an excellent seminar by Annette Clancy and Conn Ó Muíneacháin on Blogging and the Arts in the Royal College of Surgeons, organized by Poetry Ireland. Despite the shock of discovering at the last minute that the RCSI had a firewall in place blocking access to blogs, this was resolved in a few minutes and Annette carried on with aplomb. It was quite a feat to create a new blog live in front of an audience, but she managed to do so in 2 minutes flat, and an extra minute to add a graphic and a YouTube video for good measure. It was great to meet Paul from From Bath to Cork with Baby Grace, and was chuffed that Annette and Conn used my blog to demonstrate to the audience. Annette pointed out that my theatre reviews are now reaching top of the Google search engine rankings within two or three days of publication. They are read every day by people seeking information on a particular show, with presumably a high probability that they are interested in buying tickets. See, for example, the search results for Crucible Abbey.
Hopefully more than a few of the attendees will start blogging. The interesting question of how poetry can get published if it’s already online met with two differing opinions – one poet had her work published as a collection, even though her work was already online – but we also heard that if a poem is online it won’t get published in a journal. The point was made effectively that if you are unknown, a really efficient way to publicize your artform, whether it is poetry, fiction, music or visual art, is by blogging – and contra-intuitively, if you give it away for free it works to generate money in the long run.Links to the various websites mentioned in the seminar are listed here.