How to Build an Author Platform by Blogging a Book* By Nina Amir

When I advise aspiring authors to become bloggers, they usually ignore me. They don’t want to begin a promotional activity that might take time away from writing their books. When I tell them they can blog their books and build author platform at the same time, they pay attention.
If you are like most writers, you don’t like building an author platform, the built in readership for your book that comes from all types of promotion including social media, speaking and traditional media appearances. You may realize you need a platform no matter how you plan to publish—indie or traditional—if you want your books to sell to lots of readers or if you want to become an attractive publishing partner for a publisher. Yet, you simply would rather write.
Blogging, however, is the one activity that allows you to do what you do best and enjoy most—write—while promoting yourself and your forthcoming book. Not only that, you can blog your book—accomplishing all these tasks at the same time.

A Blog Builds Author Platform

Let’s look at why a blog promotes you and your book, thus building author platform. First, a blog makes you discoverable (easy to find) on the internet. Every time you publish a blog post, you provide new content for the search engines’ automated mechanisms, called spiders or bots, to catalog. The more keywords and keyword phrases you produce on any one topic, the higher up in the search engine results pages your blog (or website) rises. This means that after you have been blogging for a while, when someone searches for a particular keyword relevant to your blog, your website or blog will come up closer and closer to the top of that first Google or Yahoo search engine results page.

Blog readers and potential book buyers may discover your blog via the search engines. You can easily tie into social networks via your blog. This increases your fan base there and drives more readers to your blog.

Also, journalists search for experts using search engines. If you are discoverable, you may land radio and television interviews.

You Can Write Your Book on Your Blog

Now let’s look at how to write your manuscript as you blog. Make each one of your blog posts one tiny installment of your book. Nonfiction content is filled with keywords and keyword phrases and easily can be broken down into post-sized bits. However, fiction writers and memoirist also can blog their books if they are creative with their content plans.

Here’s how you blog a book:

1. Create a content plan.
Brainstorm every topic you might include in your book. Then create a table of contents, or an outline.

2. Create content you will not publish on your blog.
Look at your content plan and decide what pieces you might hold back for use in your printed book or ebook.

3. Break your content into blog-post sized pieces—250-500 word chunks.
Create subheadings (blog titles) for each small bit of content you will write. For nonfiction, this is fairly simple. For fiction, it can seem more difficult; think in terms of scenes and give each one a title.

4. Create a blogging schedule.
Maybe you will write two days a week—the very minimum amount—or seven days a week. Maybe you will write Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Decide and commit to your schedule.

5. Write one blog post on each day of your blogging schedule.
Each post should take about 45 minutes tops for nonfiction, maybe an hour for fiction. Remember, they are short. Compose them in a word processing program in sequence so you create a manuscript in the process.

6. Publish your posts.
Copy and paste your blog post into your blogging program and publish it using the same schedule mentioned in steps #4-5.

7. Publicize your posts.
Share your blog post via your social networking sites.


When finished, you need only edit and revise your manuscript and get that query letter and proposal written (unless you’ve been discovered by an agent or publisher in the process). Or, go ahead and self-publish your book. You’ll have created a platform that will help you sell books.

About the Author

Nina Amir is an Inspiration to Creation Coach and the author of How to Blog a Book, Write, Publish and Promote Your Work One Post at a Time (Writer’s Digest Books), 10 short self-published books and 5 blogs. She inspires people to combine their purpose and passion so they Achieve More Inspired Results and motivates both writers and non-writers to create publishable and published products, careers as authors and to achieve their goals and fulfill their purpose. Sign up for a free author, book or blog-to-book coaching session with Nina or receive her 5-Day Published Author Training Series by visiting www.copywrightcommunications.com or visiting www.ninaamir.com.


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