Book Marketing 101: How to Use Your Blog to Sell Your Novel

If you've written and published a book or ebook, you've done the hard part... or so you thought. As it turns out, that whole "if you build it, they will come" line is only true in Hollywood. With millions of books out there for people to choose from, it's difficult to get new readers to notice yours. Fortunately, a blog is a tried and true way of increasing name awareness and selling more books.

What a Blog Can Do for You

At the risk of sounding like a late-night infomercial, a blog can be your personal sales machine, selling your novel while you sleep. Sure, you can still go to those local book signings, hoping that someone will show up so you don't feel silly all by yourself behind the stack, but the internet means you can sell your book without getting out of your pajamas (I suppose you could go to a book signing without getting out of your pajamas, too, but it might be hard to pass yourself off as a serious author that way).

Have a Blogging Strategy

If you're like a lot of authors, you already have a blog. But chances are your blog isn't doing all it could to sell your novel. You need a grown-up, professional I-am-an-author blog designed to attract your target audience by providing content they are already looking for.

Just to set the record straight, a professional blog does not...

• talk about how you hate it when your husband (or wife) uses his (or her) socks to floss between his/her toes.
• show pictures of the funny thing your cat did last night.
• moan about your struggles with the writing process.
• look like nothing more than an ongoing conversation with your writer friends.
• beg people to please, please, please, ohmigosh please, review your book on amazon.

Nobody except your mom and your three writer friends care about these things (and I'm not all that sure about your mom). And the last item just makes you look desperate (we've got an image to establish, folks!).

The most important thing to keep in mind is this blog isn't about you and your life;it's about things your potential readers--your target audience--are interested in.

By writing informative and/or witty posts that will appeal to them, you'll have a great chance of attracting them to your blog through the search engines and word-of-mouth. Once they get there and enjoy the posts you've written, lo and behold, they'll spot the information about your book in the side bar. If you've got an email newsletter they can sign up for while they're there, even better (but we'll save mailing lists for another article).

What Kind of Blog Posts Will Attract My Target Audience?

Okay, you're sold on writing informative, witty blog posts that will appeal to the types of people you imagine reading your novel, but what exactly are those posts?

Here's where you have to do a little brainstorming and research.

Let's say you've written a paranormal romance novel, chock full of sexy vampires, studly werewolves, and magic-slinging bad guys. Chances are your target audience consists of fantasy-loving women, for the most part, right?

Those ladies have probably read dozens, or hundreds, of paranormal romance novels, and they're always on the look out for more.

You could write blog posts tailored to the topics they're out there searching for. A little time spent with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (it's free; look it up and play with it) shows me some of those searches:

• "paranormal romance" (duh!)
• "best fantasy books"
• "paranormal romance novels"
• "paranormal romance authors"
• "vicki pettersson" (an author in the genre)

Once you have a list of terms related to your novel's niche, then think of some blog posts you can craft around those terms (the idea being that your post will show up in the search engine results when people look up those "keyword phrases"). Your blog posts can be informative (perhaps explanations of terms) or they can be newsy (paranormal romance conventions coming this year?) or even humorous. Here are example titles using the terms I discovered:

• What Is "Paranormal Romance?"
• Best Fantasy Books of 2011
• Paranormal Romance Novels Increase in Popularity
• New Paranormal Romance Authors to Check out (don't forget to mention yourself in this post!)
• Interview with Vicki Pettersson

Whatever you choose to write about, always think about attracting your target audience. Sure, you can include tidbits about your life (I'd leave out the sock/toe flossing thing though) in your posts, but try to provide content that will genuinely help and/or entertain the very people you'd like to have reading your books.

If, through your blog, you become known as an expert in your genre, that can only help sell your novels. And you won't even have to "hard sell" (something most of us artistic types are uncomfortable with anyway). Just make sure you have links prominently displayed, so visitors to your blog will see that you're an author with novels of your own!

Don't Forget Link Building

Last, but not least, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention link building. That's where you work to get other people to link to your blog.

Blogs with more links (from other blogs, websites, Twitter, etc) are considered more authoritative by the search engines. Those authority sites will rank more highly for search terms such as the ones we talked about above. There are lots of strategies for acquiring links, but we'll save that for another article.

In the meantime, get blogging!