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What makes the perfect book blog?
by Chloe Carstairs
Use your blog to promote your book – and vice versa – by finding the right hooks.
If you’ve written a book, by now you know that “The End” is only the beginning. You now have to be a brilliant blogger, not to mention a Facebook aficionada and a Twitter buff, to let the world know your book even exists. Daunting, right? Well, the blogging part doesn’t have to be. In fact you’ve already done the hardest part – the writing the book part. And if you’ve done that properly, you’re well on your way to building a successful blog around it. Forget scratching your head for content. (That’s a word bloggers toss around a lot, by the way, “content”. Sounds very official.) You’re just 3 steps away from having all the ideas you need to generate content for several posts a week. Let’s get started.
Step 1: List your book’s hooks:
What are some cool things about your book’s main character, setting, time period or theme that you used to hook your reader. For my book, Murder on the First Day of Christmas, my hooks would include: hilarious main character, decorating , mother-daughter relationships, Christmas, amateur detectives, humor, dating disasters, mystery, Birmingham. Don’t forget themes too. My friend wrote a book about a girl who is disfigured in a fire, so her hooks might include alienation, leaps-of-faith and self-discovery. Oh, and since you’re a writer, you get two freebies. “Writing craft” is automatically one of your hooks. “Author” is another. If you’ve already made a name for yourself or lead an interesting life, you should definitely be the subject of your own blog, but knowing your hooks can still be helpful.
Step 2: Choose the hooks with the biggest crooks
By that I mean, look over your list and decide which of those hooks can generate the most content. On my list, decorators, mother-daughter relationships and mystery immediately jump out. There are entire channels, magazines and blogs dedicated to decorating but, small confession here, my author, Billie Thomas, isn’t an expert. She’s also pretty shy, so I’m going to replace decorator with hilarious main character. Billie turned this blog over to me, figuring that I’d be more fun. (I love an author that knows her limitations.) Mysteries and being an amateur detective are definitely two more angles worth pursuing, since I’m starring in a mystery series. Finally, while mother-daughter relationships are rich with content possibilities, dating disasters are funnier. So my hooks with the biggest crooks are: hilarious main character, mystery/amateur detective and dating disasters. Note: While my blog will be mostly about these things, I’m not losing the other hooks just yet. Which brings me to…
Step 3: Blog with baited hooks
Ready to use your hooks to generate content? Good, because this is the fun part. As a ‘hilarious main character’, on my blog I can do interviews with other author’s characters and there have been a lot of them on chloegetsaclue.com. I can also blab Billie’s writing tips like they’re my own, write about decorating without being an expert and talk about my fictional mother-daughter relationship rather than Billie’s real one. Mystery is probably my biggest hook and I’m having fun creating mini mysteries or giving tips on being a savvy – not to mention stylish– amateur detective. Oh, and I’m dating, often with disastrous results, so I can easily dish the dirt on those. Notice how I haven’t abandoned my minor hooks, like decorating and mother-daughter relationships? I just use them as a fresh angle for my bigger hooks.
Now if you’re books aren’t a series, can this exercise still work for you? Sure. If you’re blogging as yourself, find hooks about your life, your expertise or your writing that you can blog about. Using your minor hooks to give a fresh take on your major ones will keep the content coming. It’s still your writing – both in your book and in your blog – that will win over readers.
Hope these tips help take some of the mystery out of creating a book blog. And, hey, speaking of mysteries, I hope you’ll check our mine, Murder on the First Day of Christmas. Here’s how:
Links to books
About Murder on the First Day of Christmas
Finding a severed hand at a client’s house might throw lesser decorators off their games. But Chloe Carstairs and her mother, Amanda, won’t let a little thing like murder keep them from decking the halls. With a body under the partridge’s pear tree and a dead Santa in a sleigh, they have to crack the case before the killer strikes again – this time much too close to home.
Filled with laugh-out-loud humor, romance and a delightfully difficult mother-daughter relationship, this new series from Billie Thomas offers a fast-paced caper as these two southern ladies try to keep their very merry Christmas from turning into the Noel from hell.
Buy Now @ Amazon
Genre – Mystery
Rating – PG
More details about the book
Connect with Chloe Carstairs on Facebook & Twitter & GoodReads
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