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.”