Blogging again! Jeri Westerson is back at it and invites you...

Congratulations to Deb Romano and Alicia Kullas, winners of Edith Maxwell's SCONE COLD DEAD. Deb and Alicia, please contact edith@edithmaxwell.com.

HALLIE EPHRON: I still remember my first "encounter" with Jeri Westerson. She'd come out with her first (hilarious and mystifying) medieval mystery and was showing up at talks in full knight's regalia.

Since then, having written a myriad of mystery subgenres (Medieval, Tudor, Sherlockian, LGBTQ, Historical, and Paranormal!), she's checking in with us today with a look back and a look ahead...  where old is new again.

JERI WESTERSON: Many years ago in the early 2000s, before social media became the behemoth it is today—for better or worse—I, like many other authors were told to have a blog.

Agents and editors wanted authors and would-be authors to get an online presence. No longer could authors dwell in the shadows to sell their books. They had to be a “personality”. A commodity that the reading public could get to know. No more J.D. Salingers.

I thought about what I could do. I wasn’t yet published as a book author, though I was a freelance journalist for two local dailies and several weeklies in southern California. I didn’t want to write another “my journey to publication” blog. Those were a dime a dozen. I wanted something more interesting, something that could possibly raise my profile, so when the time came that I did get published, I might just have a ready-made audience.

So I got myself a domain name of “Getting Medieval” and decided it would be, more or less, a magazine of history and mystery.

And I’d throw in some interviews, not just of authors, but of swordsmiths, people competing as knights (yes, it’s a sport), and historians who would talk about their various subjects of expertise.

It was, of course, the interviews that put me on the map. And I would advertise those in particular to the bigger blogs out there that posted about crime writing and writers.

In fact, this strategy proved so successful, that when I went to my first Bouchercon with my agent who took me under his wing and introduced me to various Important People in the biz, that a lot of people recognized my name from my blog.

Now that’s what I’m talking about. That’s paying your dues and nose to the grindstone and a bunch of other metaphors.

As a matter of fact, the formula worked so well, I even had a blog for my LGBTQ mystery series, the Skyler Foxe Mysteries

And another one for my character Crispin Guest in the medieval mystery genre, done in first person as my character.

And then I was invited to be a part of the group blog Poe’s Deadly Daughters (now defunct) with several other female mystery writers, each taking our own week.

So that was FOUR blogs I was writing.

I was younger then. Had more energy.

After some years of success with my Crispin Guest Medieval Noir mysteries getting published and nominated for awards, it seemed to me that social media was the way to go to promote myself, and I decided to stop blogging and give up that domain name. I slowly weened myself from all those other blogs since I simply did not have the time to do it anymore.

Fast forward to today. Facebook was my biggest media platform. It was even paying me for “engagement”. I never got into Twitter, and I used Instagram and TikTok sporadically. Then with the most recent election, fascism came to corporate America, and Facebook was no longer a safe place to be, what with the rules of civility gone out the window, a directive from the top of that corporation.

That meant bye-bye any Meta products like Facebook and Instagram (and bye-bye engagement money).

TikTok and Twitter were never my jam so they were easy to dump. I migrated to Bluesky which is a much healthier place to be, but it’s not the same kind of engagement one used to have on Facebook.

And then it occurred to me. It worked once. Why not try blogging again?

So here I am. Back to the old formula of interviews, and I started with longtime friend and colleague Gary Phillips. Who doesn’t like Gary Phillips? He and I had both served terms as president of the Southern California chapter of Mystery Writers of America, I have done several stories for the wide variety of anthologies he has edited, and we’re both from the same part of L.A.

Next I asked James R. Benn , the bestselling author of the Billy Boyle WWII mystery series. And then it will be my narrator for my audiobooks (still to post). And who knows where it will go from there?

Sprinkled in between are articles on history from the two genres of historical mystery I currently write, the Tudor era and the late Victorian era (for my Sherlockian pastiche series An Irregular Detective Mystery where a former Baker Street Irregular takes up the mantle of detective).

There will be author guest blog posts coming up as well, and I’m looking forward to that from my author friends out there.

It’s a case of everything old is new again. But hey, here on Jungle Red Writers, they’ve been going strong for years. It’s a good idea to take a leaf from their book and squeeze myself back into the blogosphere. Why not? The water’s fine. Come to http://jeriwesterson.com/blog/ to get started.

HALLIE EPHRON: We're thrilled to welcome Jeri (back? back again??) and boy we so agree: that "old interview" formula still works for us.

Today's question: When you hop over and check out a new-to-you blogger, what are you looking for?