If you’re self-publishing your eBooks and books, then you’re going at it alone. Not only are you responsible for writing and publishing your work, you’re the person driving the promotion and marketing, too. Blogging is a great way to help promote your name and work, without breaking the bank. Read on to find out how blogging can help your career as a writer:
Reach Out To Your Fans
If you’re just starting out with your writing career, chances are you still haven’t created a fan base yet. Blogging can help you to reach out to potential fans and readers of your work. You can use your blog to share your writing in short snippets with readers. This will help people to get an idea of your style of writing and hopefully be impressed by your talent and expertise!
If you’re already an established writer, having a blog can help you to stay in touch with your existing fan base. You can post updates on your progress with upcoming eBooks and books and also inform your most devoted readers on launches of your titles.
Low Cost Marketing Platform
These days you can set up a blog on hosting platforms such as Blogger and WordPress.com for free. However, you might want to go for an option where you host your own blog using a WordPress.org. Now you have complete control over your content. This approach would does have a cost associated with it; mainly for server hosting space, so you would need to factor this into your blog investment plan. This can be done fairly cheaply through.
Network
The power of blogging for you as a writer will really come to the fore, when you reach out to other bloggers in your niche. For instance, if you write crime thrillers, then you might want to connect with other authors and writers who write this genre. You can do this by visiting their blogs, reading their posts and updates and leaving meaningful comments. And don’t forget to use any social media sharing buttons on the blog you are commenting at, to share the writer’s post on your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts.
When you comment at the blogs of other writers and share their content, they will naturally want to reciprocate. When others share your blog posts with their networks, your name and author brand reaches out to a wider audience, which will help to expose your eBooks and books to new readers.
Remember to have all the facilities in place at your blog to enable people in your writers network to do this, such as having comments enabled and social media sharing buttons easily visible on your blog.
Launch eBook Releases
Your blog can be a perfect launch platform to let your loyal readers and fans, be the first to know when you release a new title. You can also give special offers such as a free chapter, or offer your eBook at a reduced launch price as a way of showing appreciation to those readers most loyal to you.
Image credit: renieravin on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0
Hiten Vyas is the Founder and Managing Editor of eBooks India. He is also a prolific eBook writer with over 25 titles to his name.