Aspiring authors around the country know they should be blogging and Twitter-ing, but many of them don't know what to blog about. At the New York Round Table Writers' Conference on Friday, a panel of professional web writers debated this tough topic.

Roy Sekoff, the founding editor of The Huffington Post, told attendees: "If you can blog about the thing you are writing about [in your book], even tangentially, that's interesting." The editor noted that a playwright called him last week, asking to write about the newly released torture memos--partly to promote his new play about torture, partly to blog his thoughts about the breaking news.

mediabistro.com managing editor Rebecca Fox suggested authors create Twitter accounts for fictional characters--blogging in character as they write the novel. Guy LeCharles Gonzalez from Spindle Magazine recommended that aspiring authors and bloggers follow one writer's example: "Neil Gaiman is not pushing his new book, he's blogging about things that interest him."