♦Welcome to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop!♦
Topic #197
Do you Google yourself?
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I do. Yes. And people might initially think that’s an ego thing, but it actually has a reasonable function for someone like me. First of all, being an author is being a small business. There are tasks required of you to maintain that business. And, this is one of those tasks.
Why would you need to google yourself to maintain your small business?
Because you want to keep an eye on how your name appears out there in the world. Someone could have taken your name and slandered you, or, more likely, a book review you didn’t expect is out there. If that book review is good, you’ll want to know about it, because you can add it to copy for your books.
Do you think restaurants don’t google themselves online?
Of course they do. They do it for the reasons I illustrated above. It’s good business. You want to keep an eye on your online reputation, and you want to monitor your intellectual property, and you want to know what consumers have to say about you, so you can respond appropriately to benefit your business.
Another aspect of this is to monitor your progress. By that, I mean to check up on how well you’re doing. You can’t adjust or respond to your business’s needs without knowing how it is performing. Every successful business does this.
So, there are those people out there who may want to label it an egotistical act, but they fail to think of authors as businesses and what authors need to do in order to run that business successfully. It is a necessity. More often than not, it’s not at all an ego boost. The internet is a haven for cruelty, where people feel empowered to bully others. Those reviews you find may be unkind, and you may find that you’re underperforming in areas you need to excel as you seek to pay your bills via income from your business. Even if you don’t rely on the income, writing is still a career and therefore your home business.
Don’t worry about what others have to say about ego and all that nonsense. You have a business to run and don’t have time for that kind of negativity. Google yourself. Monitor your online presence. It’s good business.
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Hence, Yelp!
It seems that I’m in a minority on this BlogHop, by resisting the urge to Google myself. Perhaps I might try it?
I find googling myself boring. (At least my pen name.) I’m not famous enough for anyone to care to write nasty things about me!