Pulling together a group of like-minded writers for a collaborative blog is more than just picking a name and setting up a bunch of authorized users.
First you need to decide what your common thread will be. For The Romantic Journey, I wanted to bring together romance writers who were newly published or not yet published. But I didn’t want writers who were dabblers, so the criteria for unpublished writers was a little more strict. One of the writers and I were acting a critique parters, and the other is a freelance writer who has an agent.
You also need to decide on what diversity you need. The founding contributors to The Romantic Journey were really excited at how international our group is. We’ve got a couple ladies from the U.S., one from Ireland, one from New Zealand, and one from Australia. We are somewhat weighted toward paranormal, as my critique partner and I are both paranormal and our Australian author is urban fantasy. We wanted to ensure that we represented a wider range of the romance sub-genres, and we succeeded with writers of erotica, contemporary, and Regency romances.
Next, you need to come up with a theme for the blog. We are still in our infancy, so we will shift the focus on the blog as needed to meet our readers’ needs. We all agree that the focus is on what the reader wants, and we are soliciting comments and feedback constantly to help us shape the blog.
Finally, you need to come up with a schedule and tools to manage it. We set up a private Yahoo group so that we could keep a central calendar. We committed to one or two posts per month, plus responsibility for an entire week of posts every two months. That system is allowing us to keep a well populated blog without putting too much burden on any one writer.
The rest is what you would go through setting up any blog–picking your platform, designing it, picking your widgets, publicizing, and so on.
Have you done any collaborative blogs or writing activities? How did it go? Did you learn any lessons?
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