Saturday's Links to Writing & Marketing Blog Posts

THE ONE BIG REASON AUTHORS NEED TO BLOG

By: Belinda Pollard

There’s a lot of kerfuffle on the net about whether authors need to blog, and people coming down on both sides of the debate.

Just this week, I was thinking about the one big reason why it’s good to blog if we possibly can.

Yes, it’s good to get some writing practice, it’s good to build community, it’s good to have a “marketing hub” for our efforts, but the clincher for me — the thing that’s very hard to get any other way — is this one…

A blog post is very, very SHAREABLE. Long term. 

Social media is central to “organic” book promotion these days, but it needs material to feed the machine. Material that’s shareable.

Let me explain by telling a little story.

A tale of two authors

Author 1

Author 1 is someone I love to chat with on Twitter and I wish I could give her career a little bit of a help-along but… she doesn’t blog. She only has a static website promoting her books.

Twitter is the social platform I’m most active on (for you it might be another one, and that’s fine).

I tweet links from lots of different authors, and I mention them from time to time on this blog. But always in the context of providing useful/interesting information on a particular topic.

I’m not a book reviewer, so I don’t tweet or blog people’s books, as such. Every now and then I tweet about an indie book I’ve just read, if it was really good. It’s always spontaneous, and I doubt it has much effect anyway. As I said, I’m not positioning myself as a book reviewer, so people don’t look to me for that type of information.

So I can’t tweet this author’s website promoting her book, because that’s not what my readers are looking for from me. They’d either ignore it or, worse, get annoyed. But I could tweet a relevant blog post… if she had one.

But does that matter? Would it really make such a big difference????

Author 2

Let’s look at how the “shareable” thing works, in practice.

. . .

Read the full article HERE!

~*~

If you missed my writing & marketing tweets and retweets yesterday, here they are again:

1. Fiction University: Titles: The First Impression a Novel Makes http://ow.ly/yw5CL
2. 7 Things Every Twenty-First Century Writer Needs To Do | PHOENIX Magazine http://ow.ly/yw5Kr
3. The one big reason authors need to blog | @Belinda_Pollard http://ow.ly/yw63Q
4. Place and the Novel’s Plot | Meg Wolfe http://ow.ly/yw6Cm
5. 7 Tools to Hook Your Reader http://ow.ly/yw6Hc
6. What Makes a Character Sympathetic? This Video Essay from Screentakes Explains « No Film School http://ow.ly/yw8kJ
7. How to Validate Your Characters' Traits | Stavros Halvatzis http://ow.ly/ywbQV
8. Why Your Story's Ending Determines its Beginning through its Middle | Stavros Halvatzis http://ow.ly/ywbVw
9. How to Survive Slow Book Sales | Stavros Halvatzis http://ow.ly/ywc95
10. What Exactly Does Facebook “Friend” Mean? The Good, the Bad & the Ugly | Kristen Lamb's Blog http://ow.ly/ywcH8
11. 20 LinkedIn Mistakes to Avoid - Jeffbullas's Blog http://ow.ly/ywd11
12. Email Marketing - How to Be the Worst Email Marketer in 10 Easy Steps : MarketingProfs Article http://ow.ly/ywd9o
13. Social Media - The Most Effective Calls to Action for Facebook Posts : MarketingProfs Article http://ow.ly/ywdD4
14. Marketing You: How to Play to Your Unique Strengths | Social Media Examiner http://ow.ly/ywdND
15. Freebie Friday: Are You Taking Advantage of These 20 Free Online Tools for Authors? | Where Writers Win http://ow.ly/ywdZ6
16. Why Canva is Taking Over Visual Social Media | http://ow.ly/ywevq
17. 3 Ways To Personalize Your Online Customer Service http://ow.ly/yweHj
18. Ideas to Use Social Media Strategically http://ow.ly/yweXE
19. Writer Unboxed » Writers: What Are You Afraid Of? http://ow.ly/ywfn1

Happy writing and running, Kathy