I was a part of a presentation at the FOI. Sri Nandanandana had a slot and asked Sankirtan and me to do part of it. He has a website that gets over 3000 unique visitors a day and has published numerous books.

The session was entitled:

Writing to Share Krsna Consciousness: Srinandanandana Das with Madhava Ghosh Das & Sankirtan Das

He spoke on the process of getting books published by self publishing, commercial publishing, and print on demand publishing. He spoke about how to use each method and the advantages and disadvantages of each method. He has done all three.

Sankirtan spoke on publishing booklets and how to use them in preaching.

My Plan A was to use a computer set up with a projector, go on the internet, set up a new blog, take a picture of the participants, upload it to the blog, and post it to the internet. I figured this would take about 15-29 minutes, then spend the balance of my 30 minutes adding some links and categories and whatever else we had time for.

Soma let me borrow his laptop and the night before we did a trial run and everything worked — we got connected to the internet and projected an image onto the screen. About an hour before the presentation, we went in to set it up and we couldn’t get an internet connection. The festival staff sent someone to help, even trying to get a hard wire connection but nothing worked so Plan A dissolved.

Fortunately, I had a Plan B which was to take someone else’s blog post on writing like a blogger, throwing in a couple of quotes from Prabhupada, and discuss that. Notes which follow:

“All students should be encouraged to write some article after reading Srimad-Bhagavatam, Bhagavad-gita and Teachings of Lord Caitanya. They should realize the information, and they must present their assimilation in their own words. Otherwise, how they can become preachers?”

Letter to: Brahmananda – Los Angeles 1 July, 1969

“If you sit down and write some article on Krsna, that means you have to concentrate on Krsna’s activities or Krsna’s devotees’ activities, and that very process will purify your heart. Therefore we always recommend to our students that you write articles, read our magazine, read our books.”

Srimad-Bhagavatam 6.2.12-14 — Allahabad, January 17, 1971, at Kumbha-mela

Write like a blogger

You can improve your writing (your business writing, your ad writing, your thank you notes and your essays) if you start thinking like a blogger:

1. Use headlines. I use them all the time now. Not just boring ones that announce your purpose (like the one on this post) but interesting or puzzling or engaging headlines. Headlines are perfect for engaging busy readers.

2. Realize that people have choices. With 80 million other blogs to choose from, I know you could leave at any moment (see, there goes someone now). So that makes blog writing shorter and faster and more exciting.

3. Drip, drip, drip. Bloggers don’t have to say everything at once. We can add a new idea every day, piling on a thesis over time. (300- 600 words)

4. It’s okay if you leave. Bloggers aren’t afraid to include links or distractions in their writing, because we know you’ll come back if what we had to say was interesting.

5. Interactivity is a great shortcut. Your readers care about someone’s opinion even more than yours… their own. So reading your email or your comments or your trackbacks (your choice) makes it easy to stay relevant.

6. Gimmicks aren’t as useful as insight. If you’re going to blog successfully for months or years, sooner or later you need to actually say something. Same goes for your writing.

7. Don’t be afraid of lists. People like lists.

8. Show up. Not writing is not a useful way of expressing your ideas. Waiting for perfect is a lousy strategy.

9. Say it. Don’t hide, don’t embellish.

Use categories and tags to show up in search engines.

Use key words in your post titles.