Blogging 101 for Writers and Authors

As a rule, writers are great with words. Unfortunately, many of us don’t feel comfortable with self-promotion, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all of the platforms we hear we’re supposed to master. 

The good news is many online platforms aren’t used for self-promotion (not explicitly), and starting an author blog is a great way to dip your toe into the online realm. You know the art of telling a good story, and writer blogs are nothing more than a collection of interesting short stories.

It’s difficult to rise above the noise online, but the right content and promotion strategy will work wonders. Before you sit and crank out your first post, here are some things you should consider:

Before you expose every facet of your personality and rail about current events, develop an outline of what you do and don’t want to share with the world. Being an open book can be liberating, but it can also alienate a large percentage of your readers. Save divisive opinions for after you become a New York Times Best Seller five times over.

For example, if you write children’s books, ranting about common parenting choices is probably a bad idea. Dedicating a blog post to the various strains of marijuana available at your local dispensary is definitely a bad idea. Sharing recipes for “quarantinis” is also off-brand.

A dog training expert shouldn’t list out dog breeds they hate or tell purebred dog owners that they’re evil for not adopting. A fantasy writer shouldn’t rip apart popular writers in their genre or disparage live action role play.

Authors of non-fiction are often the exception to this rule. If your book is a memoir, political satire, or other non-fiction piece that requires you to establish your expertise, your audience will likely share your viewpoints on your book’s topic and there’s little harm in further expressing your opinions.

Author blogs are different than personal blogs in that the primary focus is your craft. Rather than focusing on the everyday aspects of your life, your author blog should be an extension of the world(s) you write about. Sharing character side stories, facts about the world you’ve created, and your thoughts on related material are all ideal topics.

If you need more inspiration, recall book readings you’ve attended. List out questions asked by the audience as possible topics for blog posts. 

Another great resource is answerthepublic.com. A free account will allow you to research up to three keywords per day and return a long list of questions and related topics to your keyword. For example, entering “vampire” will likely expose a fixation on how a popular series recently ended or more fantastical musings about whether or not these monsters are real.

Keep a notebook for jotting down ideas and review them later with a critical eye. Be careful when sharing childhood anecdotes (unless you wrote a memoir) or posts about a recent vacation (unless you’re a travel writer). People are less excited about mundane topics unless they have a really cool twist (“And that’s when Grandma figured out her neighbor was a spy!”).

Authors are often hesitant to share their book ideas on their writer blogs for the fear of someone else stealing them. It can sting when your idea shows up on the big screen or in a widely popular book, but given the same premise, no two writers will write the same book. There are simply too many forks in the road throughout a novel’s plot.

If you have a short story you may want to turn into a novel, don’t let fear stand in the way of posting it on your author blog. As you know, writing a book takes a tremendous amount of time. Most people don’t have the patience to write over eighty-thousand words much less turn these words into a coherent and compelling novel. 

The risk of someone running with your idea and producing a better book isn’t as large as some people make it out to be.

Talk to people who read your genre and ask them for a list of their favorite blogs. Study author blogs that your audience loves and be honest with yourself about why those authors’ blogs work. Are they funny? Engaging? Do they offer practical advice or ways to help people accomplish something?

Another way to approach deciding what to write is understanding what makes content more likely to go viral. Contagious: Why Things Catch On and Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die both dive into the psychology and science behind how content spreads.

Your author blog should be reflective of the books you write not only in terms of topic selection but also in terms of visual representation. Check out your favorite authors. Chances are your favorite cookbook author is going to choose very different images and fonts than your favorite courtroom thriller writer.

Even your color schemes are important. For a simple overview of how colors convey brands, check out this article.

Always use at least one image in each blog post. Images make your blog posts more memorable and increase your chance of attracting readers. 

There’s science behind this advice.

Humans are visual creatures. We’re more likely to remember a concept paired with an image than a concept on its own. A high-quality image also makes people more likely to click on your content on social media platforms and will increase your rankings on Google. 

Don’t neglect adding an Alt Text description for your picture. It’s a sneaky way to insert extra keywords and may drive traffic to your website through Google Images search returns.

Grabbing images from Google search results or other websites isn’t a good idea. Many images are protected by copyright and litigation is very common. Fortunately, there are a number of websites that offer free images, and many of them don’t require attribution. Try Pixabay, Unsplash, StockSnap.io, and Pexels as starting points. New Old Stock can also be useful, particularly if you write historical stories.

Remember to choose images that are relevant to your work and try to stay on the theme. Pairing a horror story with an image of delicious pie probably won’t make sense unless it also features a bottle of arsenic.

If there is one consistent rule across online platforms, it’s this: Produce quality over quantity.

Ideally, post to your writing blog once a week. If you can only create one good piece per month, stick to a monthly cadence. When people get pulled in by one post, you want them to continue browsing through high-quality pieces.

If you hit a writing streak and crank out a high volume all at once, hold back some of the content and stick to a weekly cadence. Everyone hits a rut at some point, and you’ll be thankful you have content in your back pocket.

Editorial calendars help prevent blinking cursor syndrome (we’ve all been there—staring at a menacingly blank page). Listing out ideas in advance gives you topics to draw from and the ability to swap topics if inspiration strikes. You can use a plain old calendar or adopt a tool like Asana or Trello for little to no cost.

Some writers develop a list of deliverables for each post. For example, every writing blog post will likely need an outline, first draft, editing cycle, image, and promotion. Mapping these out ahead of time will help you avoid skipping the necessary steps.

Finally, put some thought into the length of your post. Opt for fewer words if possible, but quality should be prioritized before word count. The exception is writing an SEO short description. Stick to the mandatory word count to prevent a sentence from hanging in mid-air. 

The editing phase is essential for any writing blog, and it’s best if you can avoid doing the final proofread yourself. Remember the number of revisions your novel went through. A couple of typos still probably snuck through! However, it’s not practical to recruit someone to review fifty-two blog posts per year prior to publication. 

One alternative is walking away from your document for a few hours and hoping you catch all your errors with fresh eyes. Printing out the document for markup or referencing a printout to retype sections into a new version can also help with revisions. Retyping will force you to think about each word as you write it and can help combat writer’s block.

Another more practical alternative is using editing tools like Grammarly, ProWritingAid, or AutoCrit. Some tools offer grammar and spelling checks, while others have the added benefit of measuring pacing, tense consistency, and other factors. 

Before you make a purchase, research whether your website/blog platform offers a plug-in for these tools. You can also choose to write in a Google document and have a Chrome extension do the grammatical work for you or upload a text-based document into a browser-based tool. 

You’ve agonized about your topic, written a dazzling piece, and edited the dickens out of it. Because the Internet is full of wondrous things, it’s doubtful people will find your post in a cursory search. 

Make sure to promote your author blog on social media and your email newsletter. Another smart way to promote your work is to participate in panels at conferences and pitch topic ideas to podcasts and vloggers to get a feature. You don’t need to pitch your book to get people interested in learning more about your writing. Find ways to get featured talking about the (book-related) things you love most.

Keep in mind that while the main purpose of your author blog is to let your readers know you better, it’s also a tool to get potential readers interested in purchasing your books.