Connect to Bloggers without Having Your Own Blog
By Nettie Hartsock - Mar 14 , 2008
There are many authors who have already published and are in the process of publishing more—and they just don’t have a blog and don’t want to have a blog. Guess what? That’s really okay!
Furthermore, you can still connect and reach out to bloggers or online forums about your book, and you don’t need to have a blog to do it. How do you connect online is the bigger question, and the best way to do that is to start with one website, one forum, and one blog at a time.The first thing you need to do is build your own list for outreach. This is easily done and yes, you can do it without a publicist! So don’t be daunted!
Use Google or one of the other powerful online search engines and do searches for books/authors whose books are similar to yours, and you’ll find a wellspring of possible connections for you to make as well.
For instance, if you’re a romance writer, then search some of the top romance writers online and see where their books have been reviewed and build your target list from that. If you’re a mystery writer, there’s an immense amount of online mystery and blogger sites devoted to mysteries, so you can build your list from that.
For example, here’s one great place to start if you’re searching for possible places to reach out in terms of mysteries: The Crime Fiction Dossier blog is a great resource and it even was listed by Library Journal last year as one of the top eight mystery blogs.
You can comment on blogs without having a blog, so keep that in mind, as well. I often advise authors who don’t have blogs or websites to get a unique Google Email address with their full name like JohnDoe@gmail.com , to ensure that when you’re commenting you’re still helping build your author name on the Web as well.
Keep in mind that bloggers do not exist to do things just for you, and be very honest, authentic, and positive in your comments. Comment on blog entries you’ve read and enjoyed and let them know why. (Don’t put full-blast marketing speak posts on a blog and expect to be met with open blogger arms!)
Finally, if you want to get some journalists to cover your book and are on a shoestring budget, then simply use your same savvy search skills and the Google News search function to search for the authors or their books and see what journalists or news editors have featured them, as well.
If you’ve not yet published a press release about your upcoming book, it’s also fun to do this because you can see some very good examples of press releases about books by using Google News search—and that will give you a great template for building your own.
Good luck at your online forays for highlighting/promoting your book(s)!
