From the moment there were storytellers, there were audiences fascinated with the personal lives of those storytellers. In the same way that gossip magazines publish details on celebrities' lives, many people want to know the lives of creators and artists—their romantic relationships, hobbies, influences, and whatever other juicy information one could find. It helps them feel more connected to the author, with a certain "inside scoop" that not everyone knows.
This exact fascination with the personal lives of authors is the type of audience engagement that can help build your online presence if you are an author seeking to market your writing. And in a time when everyone and their grandmother (literally) is part of a digital audience—this online presence could exponentially build your platform for wildly successful book sales.
Whether you're an indie author or have a publishing contract, your author blog is a great way to attract new readers while maintaining dialogue with your core audience. With this amazing marketing opportunity available to authors looking to grow their readership, below are 17 ideas for topics on days when it's hard to come up with your own. We've also included several tips on how to find hundreds more topic ideas to build an online audience.
- Discuss your favorite place to write and why you enjoy it so much.
- Talk about a member of your family or a caregiver who influenced you the most, and how they have supported you as a writer.
- Discuss a location you've visited that was particularly inspiring, perhaps one that ended up in your novel.
- Write about a book that changed your perspective as a writer.
- Talk about your favorite literary character and why he or she is your favorite. Discuss ways in which the author approached characterization that made the character particularly appealing to you.
- Discuss an obstacle in the writing process that was most difficult for you to overcome.
- List your top 10 favorite books and why they are meaningful to you.
- Reveal to your readers the inspiration behind one of their favorite characters that you've created.
- Post a piece of flash fiction. This article in the New Yorker has some great examples.
- Offer other authors "how to" pieces, such as "how to develop your characters" or "how to self-publish." Providing informative content is a great way to keep readers interested in your blog.
- Conduct interviews with other authors in your genre and help them get the word out about their own writing. You'll find that they'll be happy to do the same in most cases.
- Post information that would be interesting for readers within your genre. For example, if you write Romance, discuss romantic getaways or "top-10" romantic restaurants. If you write Mysteries or Thrillers, writing about crime scene investigation techniques or famous haunted houses would be great ways to engage readers. In addition to using these types of posts to provide your blog's audience with useful information, the keyword content will increase your page's ranking on Google search engines.
- Offer readers a list of your favorite writing resources. Consider providing links to purchase them on Amazon.
- Create a vlog (videoblog) discussing a topic that would be of interest to your readers. If you can teach writing or publishing tips, that's a great way to engage your audience and offer useful information to them. According to this Hootsuite article,
Seventy percent of viewers use YouTube to help solve a problem with work, school, or hobbies, and 86 percent said they regularly use YouTube to learn new things. Among millennials, the numbers for self-directed learning are even higher: 93 percent of them use YouTube to find out how to do things.
- Talk about writing mistakes new writers commonly make. This is a great way to offer informative advice that could really be a game-changer for others wishing to publish a novel.
- Discuss 15 insane but true things about publishing a novel. This title alone will be a great eye-catcher for your readers and will give you the opportunity to reveal some real facts about the publishing process that most people don't already know.
- Talk about the biggest myths surrounding the topics of writing a book. What are some you can personally bust from your own writing experience?
Tips for finding more
Now that we've discussed some blog topic ideas for you, let's look at ways you can find even more ideas online.
Look through Quora® for questions
Quora is a crowdsourced website where questions are asked and answered. With an easily searchable keyword tool, Quora gives you the opportunity to see what kind of questions other people have that might benefit from your expertise as a writer. For example, if you are self-published, a quick search of "self-publishing" returns the following questions:
- What is the difference between self-publishing and traditional publishing, and which one's better?
- Can I publish my 1,000,000-word novel or will I have to self-publish it as an eBook?
- How do I self-publish my book?
- Why do writers opt for self-publishing?
- Is self-publishing a good option for writers?
- What are your experiences as a self-published author?
Another great thing about Quora is that you can use the website to respond to questions, leaving a link to your blog article within your response. This increases your blog traffic and exposes a wider audience to your book's sales links.
Use a blog topic generator
Blog topic generators are abundant and can be a good resource for helping you come up with new blog ideas that will attract readers. This generator is a great place to start.
Keep in mind that with online content (as well as offline content), the headline you choose will affect the percentage of readers you engage. This page discusses seven different headline generators that will help drive the SEO (search engine optimized) copy your website needs to rank higher on Google (and other) search engines.
Research competitors' blogs to see what they're writing about
A great way to add to your topic idea list is to research other writers' blogs and see what they've written about to draw blog traffic. Sometimes, simply reading through a list of their headlines can give you ideas about how to write a spin-off of one of those topics and make it unique to your experience and audience.
Obviously, you don't want to completely rip off headlines, but keep in mind that with the extent of content now available online, there really is nothing new under the sun (as the saying goes). Looking to other author bloggers for ideas is a perfectly acceptable way to build your own blog copy with informative, engaging content that is of interest to readers.