This is one of those times when I wished I lived in Dublin rather than Buenos Aires: the National Library of Ireland has an exhibition celebrating the life and works of William Butler Yeats. It looks to be quite an event. It’s billed as the “biggest exhibition devoted to Yeats and his work ever mounted in Ireland.”

Works and Days is the book to accompany the Yeats exhibition: “The focus of the book, brought together by three of the Yeats Exhibition’s curators, is on the life of W.B. Yeats. It presents a succinct account of his works and days, richly illustrated with photographs and reproductions of paintings, manuscripts and books, many drawn from the National Library’s Yeats Collection.”

There is also a DVD with 4 films that “contain rare archive footage and interviews with major artists and many of the great Yeats scholars to provide an illuminating look at four crucial aspects of Yeats’ life and work, as well as also giving viewers an insight into Irish social, cultural and political life from the late 1800s to the 1930s.”

There’s not really much available online from this exhibition but there is a fascinating video discussing Sailing to Byzantium that will delight anyone interested in poetry and the writer’s process. I would like to see more discussions of literature like this on the net.

And, finally, since this is a book design blog, the exhibition offers an e-card that with the cover of the The Tower (1928) designed by T.S. Moore.

Most authors seem to have gotten the message that they should have a Web site to promote their books and themselves as a brand. M.J. Rose regularly stresses the importance of authors marketing themselves over at Buzz, Balls & Hype. But should authors blog in addition to having a static Web site?

As someone who blogs and writes fiction I can testify that blogging can be a real distraction to your creative writing. Yet, writers need an audience of readers and blogging can be one way of helping to build that audience.

I don’t advise fiction writers to blog everyday, but I think that every writer with a Web site should also be utilizing blog technology.

Blog technology for writers

I mentioned before how blog tools like WordPress can be used to update static pages as well as for maintaining a blog. That’s clearly one benefit to using a blog on an author Web site. Of course, the Web site has to be designed specifically with WordPress functionality in mind but that’s not difficult for a Web designer familiar with CSS and Wordpress themes.

Authors don’t need to use blogs as a daily journal or anything like that (unless they just want to do so). A good way for authors to use their blogs is to update their readers on new stories and essays that they’ve published. A very good example is the blog by Anthony Doerr.

(I highly recommend Doerr’s short story collection The Shell Collector. It’s one of the few books I carried with me when I moved from Miami to Buenos Aires.)

An author blog should definitely include postings about readings and lectures given by the author. Some fiction writers will decide to leave their postings at that. After all, they’re more interested in writing stories and, sometimes, essays.

Non-fiction writers might find blogging an even more valuable tool for connecting with their readers. A Web site enables non-fiction writers to bring links to all their articles together in one place, a bibliography if you will, enabling the reader to explore more of the author’s writings and, if the reader likes what he finds online, then the reader is going to be likely to buy the author’s books.

For example, a non-fiction writer that I particularly like who could benefit from having his own Web site is Luc Sante. A Google search on Luc Sante only returns links to various articles and interviews and a very brief from his faculty page at Bard. The New York Review of Books and Harper’s have the most extended listings about Luc Sante.

I wished I read Dutch since a particularly good example of a Web site by a non-fiction writer is that of Geert Mak. There are a few things in the English corner of his site for those of us challenged in Dutch.

Reading and Traveling

Blogging about what they’re reading and places they’re traveling is a way for writers to spice up their blogs a little without going overboard and into the personal diary format. Blog entries don’t have to be long. Shorter is usually better online (not that I always follow that advice) but even a thoughtful post of 100 words can be so enticing that a reader will remember to buy the author’s next book. Of course, I realize that 100 quality words isn’t always so easy…many, many writers - myself included - are thrilled to turned out a superb, small paragraph.

But, blogs are not polished writings but thoughts, unedited remarks and often that’s the problem with so many blogs. Finding the balance between quality writing for formal publication and writing informally for one’s own Web site or blog is a challenge for people who write for a living.

By accident I came across this extraordinary Web site called Common Errors in English Usage that is handy for anyone wanting to check the correct use of a word or expression. But what I found just as interesting is that there is a book version of the site, too.