I write this because I must - use an alias

I write this because I must - that about says it. I'm not particularly keen on adding my voice to the white noise of the internet, especially when I have a novel to complete, but then, that's exactly why I'm doing this. My friend and guru, the novelist Wendy Robertson, said some months back, 'Pete, you need to do a blog.' The Writers' Yearbook backed this up. So has just about everyone I've spoken to who's connected with the publishing industry. So there we are.

A couple of weeks ago, The Bookseller ran a headline stating that we're eighteen months away from the tipping point, the event horizon where sales of e-books will outnumber actual book books. A blog, therefore, is a necessary part of a writer's marketing strategy. Hurrah.

When my first book, Johnny Lonely, came out, I did actually start a blog on my myspace page. It wasn't actually my page, but the page of the main character in my novel, Hughie Youngkin. What a brilliant idea, I thought, to do the page as if it were really Hughie. This created a number of problems, foremost that nobody searching the web for Pete Tanton could find me, including myself. Only someone who had already read the book would think to search for Hughie Youngkin. Still, the page got friends.

Then I decided to start a blog. Although it was Hughie's page, I wrote the blog as myself, further confusing any would-be readers. 'My public will want to know about the quirky goings-on at my signings and events,' I thought, and maybe they both did, but there's only so much you can write about sitting for three hours at a table in Borders, haranguing the Starbuck's customers. Now that Borders is gone, of course, I wish I'd continued blogging - they'd be historical documents by now.

I tried it again with Facebook, made the same Hughie Youngkin mistake, unaware that by setting up an alias, I was breaking the fundamental rule of Facebook, and denying all the folks I went to high school with the chance to look me up and see my book. How many more copies could I have sold...

So here I am, learning from my mistakes, trying to do it properly. My current novel, An Englishman in Rocket City, is close to completion, and I suppose I'll be writing about that. Or rather, I'll be writing it. And possibly blogging.