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…

If you have been following our social media series and keeping abreast of the free advice Swenson Book Development LLC has to offer, please take note: this post trumps its predecessors. Search engine optimization, metadata, plugins, widgets, and pretty blogs all can improve web traffic and generate sales conversions. Nothing, however, is as important as the content on your website. Presentation and formatting makes a difference but it’s the content that keeps visitors coming back. Nothing but truly compelling, relevant, valuable content encourages visitors to sign up for e-mail updates, subscribe to your blog feed, follow you on your social networks, or share your website with friends. And if you can’t do any of these things… well… what’s the point? I know authors don’t like to spend time on the “new” social media. Yes, it’s less time spent on writing books; there’s no disagreement there. But consider this: how do you, as an author, expect to sell books to an audience if you don’t spend time cultivating one? The challenge of living in a competitive, consumer-driven society is the number of options available to the people. In America, we are blessed with the power to pick and choose information, whether fact or fiction. We can choose C-SPAN, NBC, or Comedy Central. A newspaper, a magazine, a website, a blog, or perhaps nothing at all. Print, PDF, or e-book. Perhaps this is a cultural Achilles heel: given the vast amount of information available to us, in combination with its ease of…

Six weeks of sabbatical from blogging this summer passed quickly. Too quickly. Sweetly slipped through my fingers.  Like melting ice cubes. Rippling waves against ancient cliffs on Lake Superior’s shores. Finding the time and space and inspiration to write and do research without worrying about what anybody else thinks. Need I say more? The website redesign gave me the perfect excuse to pause and reflect after more than 300 posts in the last three years. I took the opportunity to read more blogs by authors, editors, and publishers. Here’s a list of tips I compiled from the best practices used today by successful authors on their blogs. You can use it as a checklist for writing your next post. Write a catchy headline. Brief. Clear. Play on words. Lists are popular. Hyperbole is not. What will hook readers’ interest? The headline needs to include your keywords to pull the right readers. Start with a vibrant photograph. Pictures pull people into your writing. When you share your blog posts on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, your image will load along with your headline. The photo is as important as the catchy headline to motivating readers to click through to read. Be caring and careful of copyright on images. Use your own photographs or make sure you obtain copyright permission to use others’ images. Like a news story, let the reader know who, where, when, and what in the opening sentence. Hook your readers with a sentence which gives them…