France Publishes More Books Per Capita Than Almost Any Country. The Blog Is Its Democratic Descendant.
PARIS — The Paris blog whose analytics show 23 monthly visitors, of whom 18 are the author’s devices and 5 are people who arrived via a Google search that was not looking for this blog specifically, is a written vanity project that France’s literary culture produces with the democratic generosity of a publishing ecosystem that has removed the gatekeeping of traditional publication while retaining the gatekeeping of the audience’s attention. The writing is good or it isn’t. The audience’s attention is scarce regardless of the writing’s quality. The two are related but the relationship is mediated by distribution, SEO, social amplification, and luck in proportions that good writing alone does not determine.
The Writing Value
The blog without readers is not without value. The practice of writing regularly, of forming thoughts into readable sentences, of developing and articulating a perspective — these produce improvement in the writing that the readership does not determine. The blog that improves the writer is doing its primary job regardless of its secondary function of informing a public. France, which has a specific respect for the writer’s discipline independent of the writer’s audience size, provides some cultural support for the zero-reader blog as a legitimate practice. The writing is the activity. The reader is the recipient of the activity. Both are good. The activity precedes and survives the absence of the recipient. According to the Centre National du Livre, France has over 3 million people who describe themselves as writers. Not all of them have readers. All of them are writing.
Written for those who read it at Virtuosal.com.
