A wannabe writer recently mailed me asking for ‘tips’ on how to break into the big time. I mailed back that the only way to break into the writing game was to write — wherever he could, on whatever moved him. Start a blog to explore your own mind, find a voice and showcase what you can do, was the gist of my response.
It didn’t seem to find favor with my correspondent — ‘Who reads blogs?’ was central to his response. I guess he was looking for a response more on the lines of ‘Oh, you want to write? Brilliant, where were you all my life? Come join my organization — we need you yesterday.’
Consider this: way back in April 2009, during the run-up to the general election, Amit Varma did a post critical of Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar and the Congress party.
Yesterday, he got a response from Tytler. The story of that response, and what followed, is here.
If I were to point to this in response to the ‘Who reads blogs?’ query, the reaction likely would be ‘Oh but Amit is a star [which he is], so he gets read.’
What is not appreciated is that it took the likes of Amit considerable time, and the heck of a lot of hard work, to get to this point — to find his voice, to find focus, to fine tune the internal filter that allows you to allocate mind space to the topics that really interest you…
[While on this, Amit’s earlier post on blogging tips is worth your while; this link takes you to Great Bong on a similar theme].
Smoke Signals 
Thanks!!! I think this is useful – also as an answer to those who ask me the same question – “Who reads blogs?”
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For a while (and a long while at that) I used to think that knowing that you can write is sufficient and the rest is easy. Only recently, I have figured out that nothing works like writing a lot and getting it peer reviewed and blogs (apart from other amateur networks) are an excellent mechanism for that. Especially when you want to figure out how what you think translates to words on the screen (paper).
As for who reads blogs – well, you won’t know unless you try it, I guess.