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Great Ideas For Your Author Blog

By on October 4, 2016

We all know that writing an author blog is a great idea. It helps you to connect with your readers, allows you to market your work and keep fans up to date with what you are up to, and it can act as a useful tool for reaching to a wider audience and gaining a following too.

However, for many writers keeping up an author blog can seem like a bit of a chore. Not only does it take time and effort to write one, but coming up with new ideas for fresh and interesting content time and time again - content that your audience will actually want to hear, can feel rather daunting.

So, with that in mind, and to get you started, we thought we would share some great ideas for author blogs to inspire you with what to write about, what is most effective ,and and what will get your target audience to sit up and take notice.

To start with you need to ask yourself the following:

Who are you trying to reach? Knowing your audience and the kind of content that will blow their minds is your ultimate power. Without researching this you are unlikely to be able to come up with ideas and content that will have your desired effect.

What are your goals? What are your objectives for writing the blog? Do you want people to buy your book, to like your social media accounts, to write you a great review? Make sure you have a clear objective in mind and then include a specific call to action within or at the end of your post that makes it easy for readers to understand what you want them to do.

What are your interests? If you don’t write about something you are interested in, you’ll end up boring yourself AND your readers. Think about what your passions are and how you can incorporate them into your blogs. Even better, try to come up with a theme - this way readers who resonate with you will know exactly what they are going to get every time you post, and therefore keep on coming back for more.

Once you have answered the above, you can move on to what kinds of content you might like to try and create.

Here are some ideas:

Tutorial or how- to posts

A glimpse into your life as an author

What you are working on right now and why

A 'Dear diary' post

FAQ’s - things you think your reader might want to to know - or invite them to ask you questions!

A fun quiz

A competition or challenge

Events and announcements of what you are up to

All about the industry - what do you feel about the writing industry?

Your expertise - are you brilliant at writing romance? Horror? Poetry? Share your top tips!

An interview with...

Survey and opinion polls

Video or podcasts

Guest posts - invite other writers to post on your blog

These are just some of the types of content you could try, or, for more specific ideas:

Writers that have influenced you and why

Best books you have read and why

Industry trends and how they have influenced you and your work

Your experience of writing and getting published

How writing has changed your life

Who would play your characters if your book got made into a film

Short stories (individual or a series)

Book giveaways

To keep your author blog interesting you should try to keep it fresh, useful and creative. Experiment with different forms of content, ways of delivering it and different topics too. If you do you’ll not only find what works best for your audience, but what you enjoy doing too, and suddenly that author blog post will be something you look forward to writing instead of something you put off!

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

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

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