I’m always on the lookout for blogs that offer helpful tips and resources for independent authors trying to write, publish and market their books. Here’s a few I’ve just found:
CS Lakin’s Live Write Thrive (livewritethrive.com) contains great guest posts on writing and publishing from successful book marketers and publishers. Some of the recent topics have covered the decision to self publish or go the traditional route or to find a hybrid solution, eBook statistics, and networking.
Publishingguru.blogspot.com covers various topics on writing, publishing and book marketing. Some posts are news about new releases; others give tips and advice about writing, such as finding writing jobs or writing courses, or how to get started.
Indiebookwriters.com seems to be sponsored by some of the larger subsidy publishers, so much of the content describes the success their authors have had. However, there are some interesting posts on writing and marketing that provide some useful information.
Thecreativepenn.com is packed with resources for writing, publishing and marketing. The few posts I’ve read have a fresh perspective, which is refreshing and gives me new ideas, which is the main point of reading others’ blogs.
Lindaraeblairauthor.wordpress.com is what I consider a well-done author site. I’ll be coming back to this one from time to time just to get some ideas for building community among my readers and other promotions I might want to try.
The key thing is to not get carried away. If you want to get any writing done, you don’t want to spend your entire morning reading other people’s blog posts. Not only is that a great way to waste time, but you could easily get yourself so overloaded with information you won’t know which piece of advice to follow first.
I’m trying to manage this better, myself. So I’m going to try looking at blogs at lunchtime, and just scan a few posts, reading carefully only the ones that will help me with the tasks I am working on that day. If I really think I will want to refer to a post on a topic unrelated to what I am working on, I can make a note of the blog’s URL in a notepad file.
The other benefit to reading blogs is that it’s a great way to network with other writers and book marketers. So after reading a post, leave a comment and start building that network. The relationships you build could translate into guest posts, blog tours or other cross promotions of your work.
Sound like a lot of work? It is. But as writers, we also need to heed the advice “always be marketing.”