Making the blog work for me

 

So, yesterday I wanted to respond to someone with the last time I bought a pack of Topps Chrome.

In case you didn't hear, Topps released its 2022 edition of Chrome last week and people are flipping the ef out. I am very glad I'm not in that rat race anymore and just on the chance I could get one person to see the light, I wanted to find out how long it's been since I actually sought out that stuff.

I turned to my trusty blog. It's helped in this area countless times.

Some bloggers don't have an archive where you can look up past posts or don't have a list of labels. I don't know how they get anything done. I realize there are "now" people on this planet, where only the most recent post matters and anything they've written in the past didn't happen, but I can't comprehend living like that. I need my research. I need to answer questions.

 

Thanks to the blog, I found out the last time I bought a pack of Chrome was 2019. I didn't end up responding to the Twitter person with the answer -- people need to come to conclusions on their own schedule, I realized -- but it felt good that my blog worked for me again.

 

 

That brings me to my latest published Beckett Vintage Collector magazine article. I just received it in the mail Saturday. That means the edition with Bill Walton on the cover should be arriving on magazine racks by the end of the month. 

If the topic seems familiar, it's because it originated as a blog post. I updated it, wrote a bit more about José Pagán, made him the featured star, and rechecked the numbers and corrected a few things from the original blog post.

This is probably the most direct way the blog has helped my professional magazine writing. The topic -- which player has the most cards in Topps' high number series? -- originated from a thought for the blog.

This is the 13th article that I have had published in Beckett, either Vintage Collector or the main baseball magazine. I also recently sent two more articles in for publication in future magazines.

Of course, this is the best example of making the blog work for me. The writing money has come in handy, that's for sure. More importantly, I've realized a lifetime dream, of seeing my words in glossy print, published around the country and beyond. Heck, it's not Sports Illustrated in the 1970s, but it might as well be to me.

I also wrote a sidebar to go with the main article. This is simply a first-person account of how I completed the 1972 Topps set (I've now written two articles on '72 Topps for the magazine -- cool!)

I really leaned on the blog for this one. It's basically a diary-entry article detailing the biggest acquisitions along the way to completing the set. Since my blog chronicled all of my '72 moments, all I had to do was look through it and pick out all those highlights, such as the time I landed the '72 Clemente the same day a deer ran into my vehicle.

All of this is pretty damn sweet, to relay a collector's story to other collectors, which is something I've been doing with the blog for more than a decade. Because blogs are what magazines were. (Don't ask me what the heck Twitter or Instagram is).

This blog is one of the best examples I know of "you get what you put in." I know I've had some help along the way. I'll always credit Ryan Cracknell for pointing Beckett's editor in my direction. But I won't say I lucked into it.

Some people just want their blog to be "look what I got," write it for a few years before they get disinterested and then move on. That's probably what makes most people happy. That's cool. That's you. That's your life.

But, if you want, it can be much more.