How To Choose A Theme For Your Author Blog

An excellent author blog needs to have a theme. A theme will pull together your blog posts, your musings and ideas and give them some consistency.

Successful blogs all have themes, cooking, travel, fashion and so on. Just because your blog has the sole purpose of attracting more readers and directing them towards your other writing, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put in the same amount of thought and effort as those who blog for blogging's sake!

Writers need to make connections with their readers, and an author blog is a great way of doing this. Of course, setting up and keeping a blog going is easier said than done and many writers, despite their profession, find it difficult to know what to blog about.

An author can blog about anything, but it is essential that there is an overarching theme pulling everything together.

Why? Because readers know what they like to read and if your posts are all over the place and on entirely different topics week to week they won't know where they stand. Posts written in different styles and that have no connection to one another will confuse the reader who stumbles upon your blog and loves it, only to be disappointed by your next post. If this happens, the likelihood is they won’t bother returning to read anymore.

First of all we must remember how important it is to blog. A good author blog can be a potent tool. Even if you aren’t trying to reach a traditional publisher, your blog can be a formidable platform from which to capture new readers and a great place to direct interested parties so they can get to know your writing and understand you better too.

The most important thing to remember when picking a theme is that if you intend to keep your blog going for a significant period your theme needs to be something that has legs. You need to be able to write a whole bunch of content under this theme so going too niche or specific could be dangerous.

Secondly you need to be able to enjoy writing blog posts for your author blog. So choose a theme that genuinely excites you and gives you lots of scope to write about what you want.

Your blog is a showcase for your writing, so the first place to look when choosing the theme is what your writing is about. This is much easier for nonfiction writers who may be able to choose a theme based on topics from their nonfiction work.

For a writer of fiction is is trickier. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t pull in interests from outside your writing life into your blog to ensure you remain passionate about it. If you also love gardening, for example, think about ways you can use your knowledge, experience and love of gardening to create entertaining blog posts.

Get creative and don’t be afraid to experiment with different themes before deciding on one. Remember you are a writer and creativity is your weapon and is what will draw readers to you - so use your imagination and try to be as unique and smart as possible. If your blog has a USP, you are more likely to draw readers in.

At the end of the day, you need to love writing your blog posts. If you don’t the likelihood is that you’ll give up or do it so half-heartedly that it will never be a success. So when picking your theme, make sure that you’ve considered this above all else, because if you love what you are doing, you can’t go too far wrong!

Bethany Cadman -author of 'Doctor Vanilla's Sunflowers'

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