Does an author really need to blog? Not necessarily. If you are writing fiction or a children’s storybook, probably not. If you’re writing nonfiction or memoir, probably so. To answer the question, you must ask yourself whether you can reach the audience who will buy your book with a blog. Children rarely make consumer choices about books, but their parents do. Tina L. Peterson wrote a middle-grade novel, Oscar and the Amazing Gravity Repellent. She has a Ph.D. in mass media and communications and is an activist for media literacy. In Media Parentis is where she blogs about smartphones and sleep deprivation, Superbowl Advertising Bingo, and why we need diverse children’s literature. If you have a way to speak to those who buy books like yours, then a blog may be a tool to pull customers to your writing. If you are writing for wildlife naturalists who spend the majority of their time in the field in remote locations like Linda J. Spielman, then you likely don’t need to blog because your customers aren’t likely to be searching online for A Field Guide to Tracking Mammals in the Northeast. But if your book is about a nonfiction subject on which people use search engines to seek out new information, then blogging can be an important instrument in your author’s bag toolkit. Blogging serves two purposes. One, it helps search engines keep your site at the top of the list of hits when someone types in your keywords. Every time you post…

Many people all over the world have families who have been affected by the events of World War II. Elizabeth Rynecki is one of those people. Her great-grandfather Moshe Rynecki “depicted the everyday lives of the Polish-Jewish community in his art,” but sadly, he died in a concentration camp and most of his art was lost in the war. Elizabeth Rynecki’s book, titled Chasing Portraits: A Great-Granddaughter’s Quest for Her Lost Art Legacy, details the journey of Elizabeth as she strives to rebuild her great-grandfather’s art collection. For some time, Elizabeth has been working on producing a documentary film which bears the same title as her book, and now, at the end of May, the film will premiere in Warsaw, Poland. In light of this exciting news, I had the chance to interview Elizabeth Rynecki for Swenson Book Development, and I am excited to share it with you. Swenson Book Development: What has it been like seeing this documentary film project come to life? Elizabeth Rynecki: We filmed the first interview in 2008 and cut a 9 minute “proof of concept” trailer in 2010 as a way to generate interest and funding in the project. I thought I’d be finished in a year. I had no real understanding of the complexity of putting together a documentary film. I didn’t know how much money I would need, how hard it would be to raise it, nor how important it would be to assemble just the right team to bring it all…

Social media gives us new ways to connect with others and pursue our interests, which can include following our favorite authors, publishers, and bookstores. While it may seem an unlikely place, Instagram is one of these platforms with a rather large book-loving community. Recently, I became the new admin behind the Swenson Book Development Instagram account, but of course, there are many others in the literary community that have been #Bookstagrammers for much longer. Author and filmmaker Elizabeth Rynecki – who documented in both book and film her “emotional quest to find the art of her Polish-Jewish great-grandfather, lost during World War II” – is an experienced member of the Instagram literary community and models the best practices of #Bookstragrammers. As a guest for Swenson Book Development, Rynecki has written about writing book reviews and using Instagram, and I am excited to share it with you. Elizabeth Rynecki: Last year I posted 50 mini book reviews on Instagram. That might seem like a large number of books to read in a year, but it’s notably smaller than the number of books I started and then decided, for various reasons, not to finish. Not all books are for all readers. It seems like an obvious statement, but as an author myself I have come to understand this in a much deeper way, to the point that I’ve almost made it a mantra. My recent background as an author [Chasing Portraits was published by Penguin Random House in 2016] leads some people to…