#blogging

Guide to the Literary Internet

I’ve never really bothered to define what I mean by “litblog” for this series. That’s intentional. Whatever it is, it might be worthwhile to add to that definition a bit. To the mix of “blogs” this week, I’d like to add some new things to the mix: Twitter feeds, collections and authors on Medium, and Tumblrs. I’d include Longreads in the mix, but at the time of this writing, their site seems to be having difficulty, so maybe next week.

Writers, Readers, Publishers on Medium, Tumblr, and Twitter

There are plenty of roundup posts out there already about which hashtags to follow on Twitter if you’re interested in books , writing , authors , bookstores , publishing and so on. Slate describes the early Twitter literary scene as an epidemic of niceness but that’s changing .

There doesn’t seem to be a round-up post that I can link to about Twitter’s longer-fromat cousin, Medium.com. (There is a good list of who to follow in general , though.) So, here are some Medium collections that I would recommend, if you are interested in literary culture:

  • Biblio : Medium’s Home for Books
  • Human Parts : explores the patchwork of the human condition through experimental and traditional personal writing
  • NaNoWriMo : Reflections on the experience of National Novel Writing Month, which happens to be this month.
  • On Publishing : Thoughts about the Publishing industry
  • Writers on Writing : A space for writers to address their craft

Here are some individual blogs on Medium:

It seems with Medium that the collections are more important than the authors . It’s remarkably difficult to find authors on Medium with more than a small handful of posts. LadyBits was one of the more interesting collections, even a sponsored one, but it has already moved on .

As for Tumblr, there are plenty of interesting literary blogs to choose from, such as The Academy of American Poets , and the George Peabody Library . There are also 20 of them that Buzzfeed says “are killing it” in order to get you to click on the list of them .

Next week, I’ll return to the usual roundup of what’s top-of-mind in the litblogs. If you must know, I’m switching RSS readers this week, and I want to give myself time to learn my way around the new one before diving in.