I posted this to the Boulder Media Women email list this morning, in response to a question about the maximum number of blogs a person ought to have. Links to all three of my blogs are at my home page.

I started out with one blog about all topics, then added a second when it came free with the new website for my small press [this Press, this blog], then added a third when it came free with my book's page on Amazon.com.

I decided I would offer a different focus on each: (1) personal stuff, movies, politics, books, miscellaneous, (2) publishing, writing, and topics related to my book, and (3) the human shadow as it appears in world affairs and current events. I knew I'd find it challenging to blog frequently enough to warrant having 3 separate blogs, and the jury is still out on that one, largely because I don't have as much time or energy for blogging as I would like. I seem to go in spurts, frankly, blogging a lot when I've got the energy with occasional lengthy silences.

After a brief experiment at posting an entry to the personal blog every day, I abandoned the idea because in general I don't believe in forcing myself to do things I don't like. I do my best to post to the Amazon blog at least once a month and have been able to maintain that. I find it hardest to keep up with the blog at the Press because I haven't been working on a book until recently because I've had very limited time to do so.

I've since acquired the philosophy that one result of people blogging every day whether or not they have something real to say is that lots of junk gets published, and as a result the meaningful writing on the web is harder to find.

I've recently gone a step further than that in my thinking, to the suspicion that it's very similar thinking that got the book publishing industry into trouble. Let me wax rhapsodic for a moment and see if anyone agrees with this line of thought (and if I agree with it once I've written it out).

Once upon a time, publishers accepted only manuscripts they considered worthwhile or, failing that, salable enough to fund the worthwhile books. (I guess I'm generalizing a lot here, I'm thinking of the publishing houses that wanted to produce good books, because I used to work for publishers like that. The people who worked at such places did so because they loved books, and they wanted to publish only books they'd be proud to have on their shelves. And every one of them had shelves and shelves of books at home.)

Gradually, the publishing industry succumbed to greed, as it seems every industry does eventually. It began publishing books that weren't very worthwhile but that would make a quick buck. Walk into any B&N or Borders, and you'll see a table of what I call "junk books" for sale for a few bucks each. Books to be given as gifts, for Mother's Day, Father's Day, Christmas, etc.

Not surprisingly, readers caught on to the fact that bookstores were full of "junk books" and that you couldn't count on a book being worth the purchase price. You couldn't count on it being well edited or published because it was worthwhile. That certainly wasn't the only factor in the decline of reading (I blame television primarily), but I think it contributed.

I reviewed a book in 1997, written by a stellar writer, Maya Angelou. I had read her earlier work. It looked to me as if her publisher had decided to "repackage" some of her shorter blurbs into a book, released in time for Christmas, attractively designed and priced at an astounding $17.95, I believe (it was a pretty short book). I was disappointed to find nothing new in the book and said so in my review. I also said I was particularly disappointed considering Maya Angelou's female audience couldn't afford to spend that kind of money on a book that offered nothing new from Angelou's soul.