Book Blogging BooBoos: A Baker’s Dozen

Guest Blog by Carolyn Howard-Johnson

I often coach authors with their blogging projects. They know it’s important enough to the health of their books to hire me, but they haven’t explored their blog’s features and they tend to go blog-happy and forget that a blog intended to market their books must stay focused on, well, books. At the very least. Actually the focus should be a little narrower than that. It should follow a track aligned with the genre the author writes in or even the specific book he or she has written.

Here are some basic rules for an author’s blog if the blog is to do more than serve as a fun hobby.

1. Map out a campaign for your blog. Reread your book. What are the themes? What do the characters do for a living? What genre is it. Make notes. I mean it. You should be able to make a list of ten or twelve essential aspects of your book. Now decide which of them you want to cover in your blog and name it according. Often your name or the name of your book will work.

2. Type “labels” or keywords into that little window-like form located under your blog post window. They help people—you know, people like READERS—find your blog.

3. Don’t spend a lot of money getting someone to design your blog page. Sure it should look good, but the free templates will work just fine. People come to hear what you have to say.

4. Don’t bury your blog on the most obscure service you can find. It should be on one that Google’s spiders visit and record. That’s one reason I like blogspot.com or blogger.com. It’s owned by Google and blog posts get noticed practically immediately.

5. Like just about anything else in your book’s marketing campaign, exposure is important. Use Real Simple Syndication (RSS Feeds) to send notifications to Twitter, your Facebook page, even your Web site.

6. Don’t choose a blog service that tells you in its terms of service that in will censure and censor what you write. (Wordpress is one of those.) What if you write chicklit? Or streetwise crime? Or just like to rant? And trust me, blog visitors tend to love a good rant!

7. You know that voice you developed when you wrote your book. Don’t lose it! You blog isn’t a high school essay.

8. One of my writing pals (Peter Bowerman) ends almost every one of his blogs with a question. It’s a good habit to get into..

9. Read. Ideas come from reading everything from The New Yorker to Time magazine to other people’s blogs. (But do check the chapter on plagiarism in the new edition of my Frugal Book Promoter (http://budurl.com/FrugalBkPromo) . It will help you navigate things like quotes and the borrowing of ideas.

10. Promote your blog by leaving comments on others’ blogs—especially if they relate to yours. But do add something to the conversation rather than using a cut-and-paste comment that obviously shows no interest in the blogger or her post.

11. Add images, widgets, or ads when you can. Some blog services help you by automating gadgets that will help with this.

12. Use a service like Google’s Analytics that helps you assess where your readers are coming from and which of your blogs attract the most readers.

13. Occasionally mention some of the other things you do on the Web, like your Web site, your Facebook Like page, and your Twitter stream.

If you are a fiction writer, read the white paper Phyllis Zimbler Miller and I wrote on blogging for fiction writers (www.fictionmarketing.com). And the chapters on blogging in The Frugal Book Promoter. Honestly, do these things and you may not need to pay me or people like me the big bucks (Ahem!) to make your blog effective.

Effective involves others—writers, readers, and other bloggers. Effective blogging connects with your other online entities. You can have fun with it. You should have fun with it. But blogging effectively adds to the joy. Think of how much more fun it will be when you look at those stats and see that your blogging efforts are in fact a viable way to market your book.

 Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the author of Your Blog, Your Business (www.budurl.com/Blogging4Retailers), and a new edition of the multi award-winning The Frugal Book Promoter (www.budurl.com/FrugalBkProm) which has been Expanded! Updated! And is now a USA Book News winner in its own right! It’s also now available for Kindle at http://budurl.com/FrugalBkProKindle.

We've been awarded the Versatile Blogger Award

Virginia S Grenier, over at The Writing Mama has awarded me the Versatile Blogger Award.  As an award recipient, I'm supposed to do the following things:

1. Thank the one who gave you this award (thanks Virginia - I'm honored that you thought my blog worthy!)
2. Share seven things about yourself.
3. Present this honor to 7 bloggers (it's supposed to be 15, but I've got a deadline to meet, so I'm sticking with lucky 7).
4. Drop by and let the 7 bloggers you've honored know how they have touched you.

So here we go - seven things about myself:

1.  I'm a Writing Mama myself - I've got three children, and I'd better not get started otherwise I'd do a full blog on how wonderful and inspirational (and sometimes challenging!) my children are.

2.  I was once (formally) accused of using too many metaphors in my academic writing (still love the metaphor).

3.  I've been married for 21 years to the same person.

4.  I wanted to be an actress when I was younger, and had many years of drama tuition with Michael Blinderman, until a relatively uncomfortable audition for a film (Times Square) when I was around 14 made me rethink my career choice over an eggcream at Chock full o'Nuts.  As a writer, I find the skill of being able to get into a character's head very useful.

5.  My mother lives 15,507 kms from me (9,635 miles - a distance I couldn't walk, even with the Proclaimers song stuck in my head), but we are still very close and talk once a week. 

6.  I'm partial to almonds (no thanks - once I start I really can't stop)

7. My eyes are green (jealousy...)

There!   Those are a few facts that stray a bit from my usual bio.  

Now for the fun (and hard) part.  I've got to choose 7 bloggers who deserve this award.  All bloggers who take the time to pull together an informative and beautiful blog deserve this award and there are lots out there!  So I've ignored the huge ones that everyone subscribes to, and tried to choose a varied and eclectic mix of blogs that I frequent nearly all the time but that you yourself might not have visited.  They're like my local online hangouts and I'm pathetically grateful to their authors who keep me entertained and procrastinating. 

I'm  anti-chain mail, and this memey award has a semblance of it, but having said that, handing out kudos is something we can never do enough of, so I'll say upfront to those who I've cited below, feel free to ignore the rules and just enjoy my gratitude. 

http://sharingwithwriters.blogspot.com
My writing partner Carolyn Howard-Johnson - one of those writer's writers who is always willing to share and help others

http://eggbeater.typepad.com/ Shuna Lydon, my cousin, is a writer as much as she is a chef, and her food musings tend to the poetical - if she ever writes about almonds I'm sunk.
http://ncurnow.blogspot.com/ Nathan Curnow's Blog Eats Poet - superb poetry - always either erudite or funny and often both simultaneously.
http://heyjude.wordpress.com/ At heart, I'm a librarian, and a geeky one at that. Judy O'Connell's blog covers all elements of librarianship from both a librarian and a reader's perspecitve - it's educational and who doesn't need more education?  It's fun ("") and it's just a tiny bit geeky.  I'm there.
http://quietfurybooks.com/blog/ A Word Please - Darcia Helle's Quiet Fury blog - author focused, generous, insightful interviews. What more could you want?
http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/ Brian Brodeur's blog is endlessly interesting and one I subscribe to in RSS - he takes a macro-perspective on how each individual featured poem is created, delving deep into the creative process. 
http://grahamnunn.wordpress.com/ Graham Nunn's Another Lost Shark is a sumptuous mix of aesthetics - from music, to photography, to (always at the edges) poetry.  It's eclectic, informative, and fun.  I subscribe to this one by email and when they come, and they come frequently, I always stop what I'm doing to read and sometimes participate.  That's my excuse for not finishing my second novel yet...

The Hypothetical Library gets Dangerous

The Hypothetical Library is a sort of Borgesian blog run by book cover designer Charile Orr.  The blog asks real authors to posit a pretend book, including cover copy and Charlie then designs a cover for it.  Of course this makes the book so rich with potential, especially when the copy is good, as it invariably is, that the temptation for any author would be to go ahead and write it.  That is, unless the book is dangerous.  That's dangerous as in The Dangerous Alphabet, subversive perhaps, but maybe even deadly.  That's what this week's guest Neil Gaiman has come up with -- a book so dangerous that reading it would cause the world to end.  Seeing the provocative cover that Charlie Orr has come up with certainly evokes a response.  You can't help but begin to imagine the words that would be between the covers--to begin postulating the impossible in your own head.  Gaiman, the master of the absurd and macabre (always with a touch of fatherly tenderness), is the perfect author for this kind of thing, and he is having a week long stint, which includes an audio book and special e-book version.  Check it out, if you dare.