Believe it or not in today’s post I’m actually going to tie in the Twilight books to blogging or more generally online communities.  Ah yes, if there’s a will there is way.

When I was done reading the four book Twilight saga there was one surprise left: the Stephanie Meyer website.  The last listing on the Twilight Series page is the title, Midnight Sun.  Ms. Meyer is indeed a wonderful storyteller and offers some background on what exactly Midnight Sun is.  In short, it was her first novel, Twilight, retold by the male protagonist, Edward Cullen’s perspective.  Apparently Ms. Meyer had the intention of publishing this story but when she was not even half way through she sent out several copies to trusted cold readers.  Authors do this all the time so it’s not that unusual.  Sadly in her case the story and actual pages were leaked on the web.  Justifiably disheartened by the leak of Midnight Sun Ms. Meyer instead decided to post in PDF format the existing pages she had written on her website and abandon the project indefinitely.  Her reasoning for publishing Midnight Sun on her website was that she didn’t want her fans to have to go behind her back and read the leaked pages on a site that was infringing upon her copyright.

StephanieMeyer.com probably gets a ridiculously high amount of traffic.  If she were so inclined she could have added Midnight Sun as actual pages to her site and made it look all nice complete with navigation and sold ads that I’m positive would have made quite a lot of money.  Actually, I’m sure she would do pretty well adding ads to the website the way it is now.  Clearly she has had enough success than to bother with ads but ads don’t always have to be a bad thing; if they are done right they can even be a service for your audience.

Back to the real world.  Most authors are not going to make money off of ads and if they placed their material online and tried, they would more than likely not even be able to pay for a month’s worth of coffee outings.  But in this web focused world authors should absolutely be focusing efforts on online communities…like say, blogs.

You can’t sell a book if people don’t know it exists.  Many authors utilize their own websites to try to spread the word but that’s not enough.  What you want to do is approach established high profile communities within your target audience and ask if you can become a leader in some way.  This could mean leading an online group, contributing in a meaningful, consistent manner to a forum or becoming a blogger.

My preference is to become a blogger (of course!) for the following reasons:

• Becoming a blogger allows you to introduce yourself in a casual way to your target audience.
• The blogging format also allows you to establish a relationship with your audience via comments.
• Blogs naturally optimize well for search engines (SEO).

Comments are essential to staying in touch with your audience and building that trust.  When community is your goal responding to comments is a must.  It tells them you’re a real person they can rely on and that they should come back because you care about them. Keep your blog content relevant to your subject area but include the audience’s opinion.  If you can successfully do that your audience will trust that whatever you have to say and hopefully decide your book is worth reading and enlist the viral component of spreading the word about your book!

You may be asking yourself, “How do I become a blogger or voice on an established website?”

A lot of high quality websites generate revenue through ads.  Their product is their content and they strive to offer their readers the best available content (think relevant, accurate, current).  If you’re an established author consider approaching a contact at a website like this and offer to blog or lead an online community group for free.  The said respected website has put a lot of money into their product and have earned a lot of readers as a result.  In addition they usually promote new content in newsletters (some of which have an extremely high subscriber rate).  By allowing you to piggyback off their visibility and possible newsletter promotion of the content you’ve created for them they are doing you a service.  In return, you can offer them a service by creating new and reliable content.  It’s a great symbiotic relationship that is still not being utilized by big publishing houses or literary agents as frequently as it should.

Writers have a deep seeded fear of writing for free.  As Edward Cullen might say, “It goes against the grain.”  I try to encourage authors to see beyond the writing for free stigma.  If you hired a PR firm you would have to pay them, right?  If you built a website, you would have to pay for tech staff, customer support, graphic design and in some cases hosting, right?    Well then, think of blogging for free on high profile websites as your PR and web firm except you get to barter instead of having to pay some huge fee.  As I’ve said on these pages before, blogs might not make you money but they have the potential to make money in some other context.  In this case book sales.

The publishing world is evolving.  Digital doesn’t have to be the demise of print if they learn how to complement each other… minus some big exceptions.  The print writers that figure out the benefits of online community first have a better chance at survival.

This was longer than I intended but it’s an important topic for the Writing and Publishing industry.

Think of all the Stephanie Meyers out there we don’t know about!  I can’t wait to read her other book, The Host.  Let’s see if I can’t tie blogging into that one as well.  Seriously, if you’re a female you should read the Twilight books and if you’re male, you should read them to know what all of us women secretly desire.

Last thought.  If you’re an author and have considered creating a book online or have done so I’d love to hear from you.

UPDATE:  I just checked out the fansite section of StephanieMeyer.com, it is seriously insane!  There were so many on there I couldn’t’ count.  I wonder if any one of these webmasters realize the potential there. Talk about community.

Take care,

-natalie

I thought I could shoot people on the street the way designers looked at people, and get and give inspiration to lots of people in the process. My only strategy when I began The Sartorialist was to try and shoot style in a way that I knew most designers hunted for inspiration. Rarely do they look at the whole outfit as a yes or no but they try and look for the abstract concepts of color, proportion, pattern mixing or mixed genres.

His blog is built on a blogger or blogspot blog.  This is important to note because it proves that:

A.  A blog with a good idea and consistency  can be  successful and grow organically

B.  Anyone can do this for free with little to no technical background

In my opinion one of the best things blogspot has going for them is the intuitive nature of adding photos to a blog…well that and the fact that every URL automatically has the word “blog” in their domain name which we know helps with SEO.

The Sartorialist is a clean layout and very attractive to me.  If you were to start a blogspot blog today you could create a blog that looks very similar to this one in a matter of minutes (okay maybe a half hour if you’re new to blogger).  Don’t get me wrong there is clearly customization going on here but honestly it doesn’t deviate from the original layout blogger offers all that much.

The momentum this blog has going for it is also equally impressive.  Talk about building a community!  It’s been featured in a number of different prominent websites, magazines not to mention countless blogs like mine that have given it some sort of review (the fashion blog industry is a big niche!).  It looks as though The Sartorialist will soon have a book deal, or does already, as well as some other interesting projects in the works which brings me to another point I like to make about blogs.  In general, blogs themselves rarely make money but if done right they do create the potential to make money.  The Sartorialist is a great example of that.

What I love and have always loved about blogs is the fact that anyone can become an author.  There is always a lot of talk in the blog industry (and yes, that’s a real industry nowadays) that too many people muck up the blogosphere with their non meaningful dribble creating unnecessary noise in the blogosphere.  Rubbish.  Blogs are for anyone that has a wish to use them.  Not all blogs are created equal but not all reasons for using them are equal either.  Would you tell someone that diaries are only for people that intend to have them published?  No way.  After all, we can’t all be Anne Frank.

The Sartorialist is so worth your time checking out.  Go take a look and you’ll see what I mean.

http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/

Take care,

-natalie

The story goes that there is this guy named, Joshua Persky, who is a father of five that lost his job last year. Since that time he has been trying to secure a job in the financial market which as we all know is not the most likely place to be hiring. Anyway, he starts a blog and documents his job hunt. He finally came up with the brilliant idea of putting a sandwich board and walking around NYC with the words “MIT Grad for Hire” written on the sign. That’s pretty clever in itself not to mention extremely gutsy and humbling (I’d imagine) but it’s been said that it was his blog, The Oracle of New York, that earned him his interviews not the sign.

In addition to all the other things blogs have become that I’ve written about before they also serve as a way of putting one’s resume to the test.  It’s an ongoing cover letter, your chance to prove that you know what you’re talking about.  Let’s face it we’ve all run into that coworker where we shook our heads and wondered how they ever managed to get their job let alone keep it.  Blogs are a way for employers to actually do their homework by reading what the employee has to say on their professional subject.  A blog is also great for the unconnected, non networked person…that is if the right people read it…but there are ways to do that as well.

The one word of caution here is that if you do blog as a means to a job remember to keep it professional and on topic.  You never know when that potential employer will run across your blog so make sure that when they hit the homepage they read something that is dressed to impress.  You can always start a personal blog somewhere else just remember that search engines will read those too and if you’re using your real name so may potential employers.

Here’s to more jobs in 2009!  Happy New Year’s all.