How to Write a Guest Blog Post - by Louise Marley

If you’re a writer, sooner or later someone will ask you to contribute a guest post to their blog. If you’re a savvy writer with a book to promote, you will have identified bloggers likely to be interested in a guest post months ago, and pitched them accordingly. If you’re traditionally published, the publisher's marketing department will have hopefully arranged this for you, so all you have to do is write the thing. Simple, eh?

No? Oh all right then, here are ten tips to get you started:

Read the Blog!

Obvious, yes? Why? Because it helps you judge the style and tone of the post you're about to write. It’s no good pitching a piece about your dark erotica novel to a book blogger who only posts about sunny romantic comedies. Nor will readers of a book blog be much interested in a post about the mechanics of writing, unless they are writers themselves – it’s a bit like a magician explaining how their tricks are done. Keep the ‘how-to-write’ posts for the writers’ blogs.

Check the Requirements

Are you expected to write about a certain subject or theme? How many words do they want? As a guide, 600 to 1,000 words is the average length of a blog post. If you write something longer, remember to break it up with sub-titles or bullet points. (See: Ten and a Half Things We’ve Learned About Blogging). And, most importantly, when is the post needed by?

Stick to the Deadline

But if you have a really, really good reason for failing to keep to the deadline, ensure you give the blogger as much advance notice as possible, so they can fill the slot with something else. If you get to choose your own deadline, pick a date around the publication of your book.

Showcase Your Voice

The structure of a blog post is somewhere between an article and a letter to a friend. Whatever you’re writing about, it should sound like you speaking, not Wikipedia. You want people to read the post and think, ‘I enjoyed that. I wonder what their book is like?’

So Don’t Forget to Mention Your Book!

You are there to promote yourself as a nice, friendly author who’s written a great book, remember?

But Don’t Make It All About You

Think about what the reader can ‘take away’ from your post. Keywords here: informative, entertaining, amusing. It’s a waste of time writing a post that’s only about a book no one has had the chance to read. If your book is set in a real location, write about the location. If your character is a police detective, and you were once a police detective, write about that. The post should work out at 75% about the subject that inspired your book, to 25% actual detail about the book. Don’t waffle on about nothing. OK, it’s ‘only’ a blog post – but it should have a point! (And preferably a beginning, middle and conclusion too).

Plan Ahead

Try jotting down a list of subjects you can potentially blog about while you’re actually writing your book. For my most recent novel, Trust Me I Lie, I blogged about the true confessions of an author on social media, the enduring appeal of fairy tales, and why I love 'unlikeable' heroines – all of which are connected to the themes in my book.

Make the Blogger’s Life Easier

When you submit your post, remember to attach an up-to-date photo of yourself and a clear image of your book. Also include, either as part of the post or in a separate file, a short by-line, a longer biography (let the blogger choose which they will use), and links to your website/blog/social media accounts, including where your books can be bought. If you don’t do this, the blogger will either leave the information out or copy a bio from Amazon/a social media site that might be out-of-date. But make sure the file sizes are not so big they’ll fill the blogger’s inbox. That is not the way to make friends!

Don’t Be a ‘Difficult Author’

It’s your responsibility to ensure your post has been proofread, any stated facts are correct and it is in every way perfect. Also accept that the blogger is completely within their rights to edit the post for length, take out anything they consider might get them sued, or even reject it completely.

Promote the Post!

Don’t leave the entire promotion of the blog post to the blogger! They’ve been kind enough to host you on their blog and given their time free of charge. The least you can do is share the post across social media and visit the blog to check for, and answer, any comments.

If your post is popular, you’ll be invited back. Who knows, you might even discover you enjoy writing blog posts so much you’ll start a blog of your own …

Louise Marley writes mysteries and romantic comedies. Her most recent book is Trust Me I Lie. 

You can find her blog here.

Ten (and a half!) Things We've Learned About Blogging

It’s become increasingly important for authors to have a ‘platform’ to promote themselves and their books, but keeping a blog regularly updated can eat into precious writing time. A way around this is to have a joint blog with a group of friends. We started this blog way back in September 2012. It took a while for us to find our feet. We had no schedule - posting randomly whenever we felt like it, or not at all! Gradually our confidence grew, along with our visitors, and we now average over 100 hits a day. We’ve made mistakes along the way - and no doubt we’ll keep on making them! – but we have learned from them.

And here's what we've learned:

To ensure we stayed friends, we agreed in advance about the essentials, such as what we were going to blog about, and how often, and whether to have guest posts or to make our blog all about ourselves.

We learned to keep the design of our blog simple. Going mad with graphics, multi-coloured fonts and too many large photos meant our site was a bit slow to load and kept doing weird things. Occasionally it still does weird things but we decided to stick with the orange swirls because they've become our trademark. We've recently created a news page for our book launches and new releases, and another page lists all our latest books. This keeps our home page free for our blog posts.

We now tell visitors who we are (we used to be mistaken for a book blogging site!) and have lots of photographs to make ourselves seem more 'real'.

Most of our blog posts are around 600 words long, which we hope are just the right length to read during a coffee break. But we also like to alternate these with longer posts, which we break up with sub-headings, such as Valerie-Anne Baglietto did when she wrote this post about her favourite childhood books. (It makes them easier to read.)

We love photographs, but prefer to use our own rather than breaching someone else’s copyright. We recommend getting into the habit of carrying a camera around and building up a library of suitable photos, even doing your own photo shoot, as Johanna Grassick did for this post about books.

A group of authors blogging together can create a cross-pollination effect amongst their readers, but we try to be subtle about promotion. We write about the themes in our books rather than the books themselves. Trisha Ashley wrote a post about her pets when promoting her novel about a dog rescue centre and Juliet Greenwood wrote about creating a WW1 garden when her book set during the Great War came out.

We make sure our posts have a point to them and we’re not just blogging 'because it’s a Monday and we always blog on a Monday'. We try to make our posts informative, interesting, or at the very least entertaining - and occasionally tongue-in-cheek, like this one by Louise Marley.

If we get stuck for ideas we brainstorm subjects and themes. We’ve written posts about where we write (June Francis), how we juggle writing with family life (Anne Bennett) and even our favourite Christmas traditions (Cheryl Lang).

We keep an eye on our blog statistics and have found our posts about writing, research and inspiration are the most popular, especially this one by Annie Burrows, which has had almost 2,000 hits.

Finally, because there are ten of us, our posts receive ten times the exposure when we all link to them from our personal social networking sites. We tag our posts with all the (relevant!) labels we can think of. We try to keep old posts going by linking to them in a new post (in the same way we’ve done here - sneaky, eh?) or add the links in a list at the end, sub-titled something like ‘Related Posts’.

Setting up a blog and finding things to post about can be intimidating but with a group blog we can bounce ideas off each other and share the work between ourselves. And very often it doesn’t seem like work at all!