These ideas are designed as a style guide, and a content guide, to help writers sell lots more books.
Author blog posts should be published on your own website or blog whenever possible, to draw people to a site with your branding.
We encourage you to write book-related blog posts, because they are more likely to gain you readers. While it is possible that you will win readers by writing about writing or about your daily life or your views on other subjects, the likelihood of selling your books that way is less than if you write about subjects directly related to your book or books.
Our guidelines are meant to help, not to prevent you blogging, so please feel free to blog on whatever subjects take your fancy. Just be aware that extending your book online, by writing about the following subjects, and in the following manner, is the most likely method of finding new readers and the only way to ensure that BookGoSocial will Tweet your blog post for free, if you are a paid up member.
Here’s our suggestions for what to write about:
- The Inspiration behind your book – other authors, specific books, events in your life, a story overheard. The link with the story in your book should be described clearly early on.
- The benefits of your book for the reader – what you feel the ‘point’ of reading your book would be (could be to learn, for a thrill, for pure pleasure, to experience fellow feeling, to laugh, to have a good cry, or some other benefit.)
- Your protagonist – a short original piece involving or describing your protagonist(s), so potential readers can get to know him / her better.
- A prologue / epilogue to the events of your book – without giving anything away, you could write a short story which might be set a year, ten years, a hundred years in the past or future, which subtly relate to or affect the events of your book.
- The world of your book – a short original piece, describing / outlining the world contained within your book. This could take the form of an account of the heroine’s local town, a summary of the political situation at that time, or the legal charter drawn up by the evil leaders of your dystopian alternate planet.
- A related story – a short story set in the world of your book, but not intrinsically related to the events or the main characters of the book (potentially including a secondary character from the book, like a man seen on a bus, a cartoon cat referred to in passing, or an entirely new character from within the world of your book), to give people a taste of your writing style.
- Conflicts and themes featured in your book.
- Lists & attention grabbing headlines mentioning items directly related to your book.
- Out of copyright maps, pictures you took, illustrations you have permission to use, short trailers and original graphics can enrich your posts or even be the centerpiece for a post.
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Many authors slip into talking about writing, or the difficulties they face in their daily lives or getting reviews, because it’s easy to do that. I recommend the above subjects for the purpose of selling books. The important thing to remember about any blog post is that it needs to be relevant to your book, to help sell it, and it needs to be short (we recommend 300 – 700 words, depending on context, though an occasional super long post can work too) and well laid out and it must have pictures.
Longer posts can also be shaped into a series, which solves the problem about what to blog about next. Series can also contain cliff hangers and foreshadowing to keep potential readers coming back. Hoping that readers will feel sorry for our difficulties and buy our book, is not an effective way to sell books. Talking about the price of your book is also not a blog post. It’s an ad.
I recommend two images per post, as a minimum, a large font (14-18 point), short paragraphs, and a link to a purchase page for your book at the end of every post. There is a lot of work involved in producing effective blog posts.
Your posts will improve over time if you are patient and experiment. Please, edit your posts too. This post was edited at least 10 times. Edit for structure, conciseness, repetition, language and spelling. One wrong letter and you spoil d’affect.
Titles and first paragraphs should be particularly interesting, to ensure people read on. If they can contain a hook, to get us to keep reading, all the better. Avoid cliches too, both in the subjects of your posts and in your writing. Be different. Say something new.
As you all know, people’s attention span when online is limited, so if you can compose something short and snappy, which leaves people wanting more, you’re onto a winning formula!
To help you source images, please note that all images used in this post have been paid for, for commercial use, at about $1 each at Depositphotos.com. Artists deserve to be paid.
Great information! Concise and to the point. Very helpful and I too an fond of cat cartoons:)
Hello Laurence:
My most popular blog articles contain over 1500 words.
Why do you recommend 300-400 words?
Thank you,
Mitchell
Author of Sociopathic Surgeon
Mitchell,
Occasional long form post can work. However, I recommend short posts as a general rule for writers, for the following reasons.
1. To condense ideas is a good thing. Many people abandon long posts. You may have written an excellent one, but a lot of long posts are self indulgent.
2. You can turn a long post into 3 or 4 short posts and reduce your weekly workload.
3. It’s a challenge to create a consistent flow of weekly posts. If you have a short post target, the challenge is reduced.
4. Our attention span is reducing too online. If you can say something new in a short form you will cater to a larger group of readers.
5. Many people abandon long posts. I want readers to get my point and come back for more.
Cartoon Cats – Woohoo! Great tips, I’m pinning these for later: http://www.pinterest.com/amymorse184
Great article. I ran this idea past a well known writer and he shot it down. I’m glad I’m not crazy.
All good ideas get shot down. We stand back up again and keep going, because we do what we believe in. Signing books in book shops was shot down, as was the motor car and telephone, but they all caught on, eventually.
Thanks very much for putting this up for us newbies.
Great article to remind us writers to expand the conversation about our books beyond the story inside the book. You never know when a reader will discover a blog post, and then go from there to your book.
I’m wondering about a short book to complement some content to follow on a new website.
Thanks for the discussion, ideas and thoughts.
@h2cm
Thanks for the information. I have a blog that isn´t attracting followers. Partly owing to laziness and perhaps paying too much attention to my twitter account. And partly not being true of what my main posts should be. The suggestions have given me a few ideas.
Thank you, Laurence
amazon.com/author/lawrencegtaylor
Very good article, thanks Laurence. I’m learning a lot from these posts.
It would have been beneficial to me if I had read this much sooner. I’ve written a few blog posts and according to this blog post, I’ve been way off the mark. I suppose, I will start over now.
Hopefully, I’ll get the hang of it, and blogging will improve and I will gain some followers.
This may be a silly question, but… Why would anyone want to spend precious time reading a beginning writer’s blog? How would the public know that the blog even exists? What would attract people to a blog? What would make them stay and read it? I don’t have a blog, but I can’t imagine why, if I did, anyone would want to read my musings on my book. I’m a nobody in the fiction world, so who would want to read my blog? And why?
Timothy,
Here’s how to get readers. You write about the subject matter of your book. Say it’s about New orleans, you write about New Orleans. That way people whp are interested in New Orleans will have a reason to come back.
Getting readers for a blog is a bigger issue. I suggest using Twitter and Facebook. And if you have the money ($49) become a member of BooksGoSocial.com. We promote author blog posts to over 750,000 readers every day.