Authors, What Should You Blog About?

I admit it: I’m a snoop. When I see authors chatting on forums or on Twitter, I click the links in their profiles and check out their sites. I poke through people’s desk drawers when I visit their homes too!

Because of my…snoopiness, I’ve seen a lot of author blogs. That means I’ve learned a lot about people’s cats, writers’ block, and the weather across the country. These subjects haven’t done a lot to sell me on those authors’ books.

So, if not cats, writing, and weather, what should you be blogging about?

I’m glad you asked!

If the main purpose of your blog is to sell books, then the posts you write should be geared toward attracting your target audience.

It seems obvious, but we don’t do it! I’m not even doing it with this blog (which is why I started Kindle Geeks a couple weeks ago). Most of the bloggers I’ve seen who get this are non-fiction authors. They sell books on starting a home business, and by golly they blog about starting home businesses.

If you write science fiction or thrillers, then you should be trying to attract readers who buy books in those genres. This means writing cool or informative (or both!) posts on subjects those people are interested in.

Book Review Blogs

The most obvious choice for attracting book readers is a book review blog. You can post about books you’ve read (that just happen to be like yours, eh?), upcoming releases, and popular authors writing in your genre.

This is a chance to show off the unique way you rub words together, and, if you promote your blog well, it can draw in exactly the readers who are most likely to buy your books.

Hint: Don’t just review indie authors or up-and-comers you’ve met online. Write about popular authors/books in your genre (AKA cash in on someone else’s fame). More readers will be looking for information on their favorites.

What else ya got?

If you’re like me, and you just don’t have time to read as many books in your genre as you used to, the idea of a book-review blog may leave you with an “Enh” feeling. Thanks to the time spent writing and promoting my own stuff, I’d be lucky to get two reviews up a month right now.

I don’t have a pat answer for you here, other than to say, “Be creative.”

If you’re a fantasy fan who spends every weekend at a convention or renaissance fair, I bet you could make a fun blog out of covering events. And who’d be looking for information and cool stuff about those places? Your target fantasy-loving audience, right?

Do you have a sense of humor? Exploit it!

While many blogs have grown popular by informing and educating, some hot blogs simply entertain. People love to link to cool or funny things (this is why sites like Stuff White People Like and I Can Haz Cheezburger are a lot more popular than my e-publishing ramblings will ever be).

If you’re a fantasy or science fiction author, you’ve probably seen the Evil Overlord list. This isn’t on a blog, but imagine if you’d put it together and posted it on your author blog. You’d still be getting target traffic to your site ten years later!

Like I said, be creative. Figure out what resonates with you and will attract your target audience. Ideally, your author blog should be fun for you to maintain (at the least it shouldn’t be something you dread working on).

But what about my writing blog? Isn’t it good to attract other writers? They’re readers, too, right?

I’m guessing someone will ask, so I’ll go ahead and address this here. If you want to maintain a blog about writing, by all means, do so. (As I admitted above, my e-publishing blog falls into this category of being more for writers than readers.) But I urge you to consider another blog that’s geared more toward attracting readers than fellow wordsmiths commiserating with your writerly woes. Yes, writers are readers, but you’re limiting yourself if your blog is predominantly of interest to them. Also…

There are ten bazillion blogs on writing out there (really, I counted).

If you’re not already a somebody, it’s going to be hard to gain a lot of followers writing about writing. Sure, you’ll get your crit buddies and your family members reading, but we want thousands of people visiting our blogs each month with brand new folks discovering us all the time.

If you haven’t read it before, Seth Godin’s Purple Cow is a short but good read. (If you’re like me, you’ll say, “well, duh” as you’re reading it, but then you’ll realizing you’re not actually doing that which is so obvious.)

Now, my friends, go off and blog!