My theme this year is blogging about my author brand. Wednesdays' posts are book reviews.
A Year Of Author Blogging: How To Write Engaging Blog Posts That Win You Readers And Boost Book Sales by Sophie Wainwright
This book, which is from 2015, suggests many topics for creating blog posts. Unfortunately, if you're an author who has been blogging for years (like me), you've probably done all the ones that interest you. I came up with three posts ideas from this book, two that I'm not sure I like.
One idea was a Blogaround. In my online travels, I've visited thousands of blogs, and never once came across this term. (https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/ Google sent me to this blog, where I found it in use!) Unlike a blog hop, where bloggers connect with each other by visiting one another blog, this is just a simple post on your own blog highlighting your current favorite blogs or posts from others. That's something I could get into. In fact, I like the idea so much that I'm giving the book FOUR stars instead of three- an entire star just for this idea.
While I did find other books by Sophie Wainwright for sale, this one seems to be out of print now. I picked it up on Amazon years ago. I do enjoy reference books like this. Anything to spice up a weekly pastime of mine is always welcome!
Another suggestion of the book was to check my site metrics for the keywords used to find my blog this month. The book does not give instructions on how to do this. Google was not especially helpful, either. I spent four times as many minutes figuring this out as I did reading the book. (The answer, in my case, was that no one used a keyword to find my blog this month.) It was fun to look at my other stats for April though.
The title makes sense. (Though, having done almost everything listed in this book on my previous version of this blog, I can't say that it does much for book sales.) The cover looks like a 2015 cover normally would.
The book suggests writing a blog post on HOW to write a good book review. Not only did I do this, but I made an entire month of posts on the topic, and then compiled it into a book which is for sale. So, as far as a tip on blog post ideas, I'd say that's a fairly good one.
Honestly, I've been to hundreds of blogs of authors, and pretty much everyone is using most of the ideas in A Year Of Author Blogging. So, if you can't get a copy of this book, you could always follow a bunch of author blogs and make posts based on what they're doing that you enjoy. Give those bloggers a shoutout!
I have no relationship with Sophie Wainwright. In fact, I went five-pages deep on a Google search for her-- no blog, no social media, not even a Goodreads profile as far as I can tell.
I saved this book for my Y post hoping it would at least get me through May's posts. If I were new to blogging, it would have; but unless I want to repeat things I've already done, I'm afraid there's not much here to use.
I like the blogaround too!
ReplyDeleteA couple of blogs I've visited put a list of couple of bloggers they like and follow, especially during the A-Z challenge but I've never heard of the term.
The stats and the keywords are actually to access on wordpress, I hope it is the same for blogspot..
I've never heard the term blogaround, but in the early days of blogging (circa 2006) that's what we were all doing -- keeping a web log of the places we visited on the web, often other blogs.
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