Unabashed

Cherie Priest is the author of Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Wings to the Kingdom, and Not Flesh Nor Feathers, all from Tor Books. She has also produced two titles through Subterranean Press — Dreadful Skin and Those Who Went Remain There Still (forthcoming). Her first novel, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, won the first annual Blooker Prize for fiction.

The intent of this interview was to briefly explore the correlation between the Cherie’s blogging pastime and her career as a novelist. Cherie is a sort of visionary, though she may not grasp that just yet. She’s one of those few authors who are successfully utilizing their blogs as platforms to promote their products, providing at the same time an avenue for their readers to connect with them in a way that has never been possible before. It’s a revolutionary concept that more and more writers are taking advantage of; the thing that makes Cherie unique is that she was first successful as a blogger, and then as an author.

A bit of info about her blog: Heretic Spire has a 200 Technorati ranking and a huge following of faithful readers (including me, resident lurker :-) Her digital shadow spreads much farther than LiveJournal, however. Her official website is at Cherie Priest.com, and she keeps an often-entertaining photoset on flickr.

This interview was composed in a simple set of questions I tapped out in an email to Cherie, who very graciously accepted and took a bit of her time to entertain us with her replies.

Unabashed: When did you start blogging?

Cherie Priest: About a week before 9/11. That’s a rough way to keep score, I know, but that’s how I remember it. A buddy of mine online had been snared by LiveJournal (aka LiveCrack), and he wanted to let me see some of his filtered posts … but he couldn’t do that unless I had an account. So I started one. That was back when there were only about half a million LJ users, and you had to have an invite to get onboard.

U: Was Heretic Spire your first blog?

CP: No, the first one I ever had was an LJ with the handle “fourandtwenty” — but it has long since been deleted. I started fresh with my present blog, though for awhile its handle was “wicked_wish.” I renamed it to “cmpriest” a few months ago. In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure why.

U: What were your expectations?

CP: I expected to get hit on by creepy internet people, meet a few otherkin furries, and maybe do a little networking. My expectations were met to a full and wondrous extent!

U: When did you first realize you had a dedicated readership which was interested in your writing?

CP: Well, I’d been writing on the old LJ for a year or so when I finally clicked the “full view” option on my bio page … and realized that I had a hundred or so subscribers who I knew nothing about. It wasn’t much of an audience, but it was still startling. The audience I’m presently blessed to enjoy didn’t happen overnight, though; it grew over a period of about seven years.

U: Would you ever classify yourself as ‘topical’ when you write in your blog, or are your posts just random ruminations?

CP: The last few years in particular I’ve given a lot of space to my writing career. It’s hard not to, since that’s what’s mostly going on in my life. I also do a lot of movie reviews and some industry gossip; but I’m equally likely to post kitty pictures or lame YouTube videos. Sometimes I’m just too busy to bother. (Thumbs up to the kitty posts! -Matt)

U: I’ve read that your book, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, could be classified as a “Blook,” and that it was written based on concepts you wrote about on your blog. Can you expound on that?

CP: When I first started working on it, I would occasionally post in-progress chapters online for the LiveJournal crowd. Come to find out, it was being regularly read by an editor for a small press in Georgia — and before long, they’d signed me to a book deal. It was a micro-affair, and the publisher ended up reverting the rights back to me … at which point they were sold to Tor.

U: Did you do anything in particular to build your readership or did they just find you?

CP: Mostly people just found me. For a long time, most of the people in my online audience were people I knew in real life. And I know a lot of people in real life. Over time, it grew to include friends-of-friends (or “social cousins” as I like to call them), and gradually the friends of those friends. And of course, once the books started coming out, people who’d found me in a bookstore could just as easily track me down online.

U: Did you have the idea for Four and Twenty Blackbirds from the beginning, when you started your blog, or did it develop as you blogged?

CP: I started writing 4&20 as part of a graduate writing project. It was largely uninfluenced by the blog medium itself.

U: How has publishing fame impacted your readership?

CP: I’d like to think that writing professionally and blogging in my spare time have fed each other in some respects. Some of my books are bought by people who don’t ordinarily surf the net much — and my blog readers who don’t ordinarily buy many books might pick up a copy of mine, because they read me all the time anyway. The hobby and the career go hand-in-hand at this point.

In the end I can only surmise that Cherie Priest is a writer of rare talent, whose words are entirely readable and entertaining no matter if she’s writing a novel or a label for a bottle of ketchup (although I don’t believe any condiment labels are in her repertoire. Yet). Her blog has risen in popularity without gimmicks, without advertising, but through a simple, wonderful combination of wit and raw ability. In short, Cherie Priest is a writer destined for greatness, and I’m happy to have had the opportunity to interview her (hey, does this mean I’m a social-cousin now? :-). Buy her books. You won’t be sorry.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, blogger, Cherie, livejournal, lj, Priest