How to Set Up a Free Online Blog to Promote Your Book

Setting up a free online blog is a great way to not only promote your books but build your brand as an author.  Many popular authors have set up their own blogs where they can not only post samples of their work, but also posts on topics of interest to their readers.  You can even use the blog to interact with your readers by, for example, asking them to contribute suggestions for titles for upcoming books or even names of characters. And unlike personal websites, blogs are easier to set up and maintain, requiring no particular technical knowledge on the part of the author.

The first step in setting up a free online blog is to choose a blog platform.  Most authors who are new to blogging usually start out with hosted blogging platforms such as WordPress in which the blog is hosted on their domain with the URL being a combination of your blog name and their own address, i.e. authorblog.wordpress.com.  Apart from being free, the main advantage of using these hosted services is that it is very easy to set up the blog and add new posts as the site itself will guide you through the process.  Of course, these free solutions have many limitations regarding configurability and design, since you are limited to the templates offered by the site, but you can eventually move up to self-hosted blogging when you have more experience and can afford to pay the hosting and domain name fees.

Once you’ve set up your blog, the secret to successful blogging is to regularly update the site with unique and interesting posts that will give visitors a reason to constantly return to your site. If you can spare the time to update your blog daily then you should do so, but otherwise once or twice a week will be enough to maintain readers’ interest. Make sure that you write about subjects that you feel passionate about and that you feel your readers would enjoy and find useful. This passion will make visitors look forward to reading new posts on your free online blog and help build a steady readership.

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The Importance of Forming a Writers Group

Human beings need to communicate with each other in one way or another and reading is one of them. Writers group is association of different categories of people who unite to make use of their writing skills and ensure continuity of writing. This is crucial in the day to day living since it guarantees people help and support whenever they run out of ideas to write on.

A Writers group is a group of people say 3 to 5 who meet regularly to share their writing with each other and learn new traits in the art of writing. These groups could involve writers of different categories such as fiction writers, non- fiction writers, creative writers and so on. All these writers meeting in one place encourage each other in their different writing and appreciate each other’s unique writing style.

Thanks to technological development, anyone who is willing to join a writers group can do so online. Online groups are quite simple to join and they help you get connections in the writing world by getting positive criticism from people who have been in the industry for long enough, all you have to do is share your work and you could get great ideas on how to make it better. Examples of the online writers group include poetry, boost, Christian and professional writers’ groups. All these groups and many others that are available online are designed to serve the purpose of boosting the morale of the writers so that their writing can be really interesting to the readers.

Whenever you write anything for publishing, as a writer you need to know that your target audience will only read it if it is interesting and informative and that is one of the biggest challenges that writers group have to deal with on their daily basis.
The other challenge is the sources. You need to have adequate information to be able to deliver the same. Writers group share ideas from the various sources of their research to be able to write a comprehensive information on their various topics .As most of them would state, if you are doing research from people to be able to come up with a remarkable result, they will always decline to giving you the information. Some want some bribes, others fear for their security while the rest are just ignorant.

When Writers group are together, they are able to discuss and come up with ideal ways of dealing with their sources since they have to deliver no matter the ups and downs. They are also able to share the knowledge gotten from their various researches, combine it and do excellent work .As the saying goes, two heads are better than one, you will realize the truth in it after reading work by an individual and the one from a group of people.These groups have been formed to curb the problem of insufficiency in the work published by writers.Therefore, it is advisable that everybody who has a passion for writing and want to produce excellent results to join the Writers group or form one.

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Things to look for in an Online Writing Community

Community is important for us all, and the online world makes communities of all kinds more possible.  The life of a professional writer can be isolating, so an online writers group is a great way to reach out.  But the paradox is that a writer NEEDS to be alone to do what they do best.  How to deal with this paradox?  You will have better odds of finding the right online writing community for you if you are clear about your expectations and desires when you go Googling.  Here are three things to think about:

1.    Talking to other writers won’t make you a writer.  Let’s face it – generating ideas, buying the tools of the trade, and hob-knobbing with people in your desired field are always the fun parts.  Doing the work and sticking with it is the hard part.  Your online writing community should spur you on, but not distract you.

2.    Not all writers are cut from the same cloth.  Before you settle in and buy an extra toothbrush, notice what genre your new online friends are writing in.  As writers there will always be things to share about how to get book published and how to find writers agents. But before you invest a lot of time, you might get more mileage out of friendships with the same kinds of writers. A Christian romance novelist is a different breed from a comic book writer.

3.    Feedback has a proper time and place.  It is good to get clear with yourself about when feedback is actually useful to you.  People can’t access your imagination.  That’s why we have to create it before they “get it”.  The new energy we get when we have a new idea makes it a real temptation to share right away, but it can be very deflating to have people who don’t catch your vision start poking holes in it, or even respond with less than enthusiasm.  That burning need to let your creating take form is a precious gift that can be fizzled out by sharing too soon.  Some writers prefer not to share their work until they are completely done with a manuscript. Writing is an intensely personal process.  You have to catch your own groove to really be inspiring.  We all need editors and they make our work better. But if you start writing to please other people too soon in the process, you risk loosing your unique spark.

An online writing community is a wonderful thing.  And self-knowledge makes all good things great. Finding your own balance between community with solitude may be one of the golden keys to success as a writer.

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Protect Your Book Rights

It’s a lucky writer who sells millions of copies of their books.  I have always been intrigued by some of the companies out there in the book world who sell really cheap copies of the classics.  When I explored this I found out that the copyrights on old works expire after some time.  If there isn’t a family member around to keep renewing the copyright, then companies such as the one I mentioned can publish works without renewed copyrights and sell them very cheap.  I have heard stories of people who wanted to sell book rights before trying to publish something without expecting any royalty money.  This was because they thought they would make a larger profit if they were to sell book rights at first chance.

I have heard other stories of artists who were in a movie, and refused payment for their role but chose to get a percentage of royalties from the profits.  This sort of arrangement has been extremely lucrative for the few and far between.  I think if I were going to sell writing, even if it were more complicated, I would never sell book rights to a company.  I have heard some bad stories about people who did this who didn’t understand what they were getting themselves into.

And if your writing is used later, or redone, the people who use it don’t have to pay you anything at all and might end up making a lot of money from your effort.  I have heard of a lot of remakes where the copyright expired and then it was quite a steal for the person who made the remake to do so.  I think that writers and other types of artists should always try to protect themselves.  It may be complicated but if you are selling a work to someone, or just publishing it and copyrighting it yourself, it might be helpful to have your lawyer friend look at the terms.  You never can tell what’s going to be really popular or what’s going to be a dud in the world of public entertainment.

To read more visit my free online blog.

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Group Writing With Benefits

In the course of my adult life I have tried to add interest to my life while learning something by joining a bunch of different groups. I first learned about the kinds of benefits an activity like this can bring into your life in high school, by taking dance classes with my sister. In later years I became more interested in writing, so while I did some experimenting and tried groups such as acting groups, singing groups, and dream interpretation groups, the most useful direction for me was to partake in a writers group.

In my experimentation, I grew a lot depending on the individual group and who was teaching it. I also tried out forming my own groups with my friends so we didn’t have to pay anything.

One of my first experiences with this was when I was in college and I attended a writers group that was an off branch of my course of study. I was a freshman and in my first ‘program’ as they called a particular educational course at my college. I saw that the teacher was great at leading but she also used a book a lot to get the exercises she used. When the group finished I continued using the book by myself and found that my writing continued to grow.

I graduated from college and moved to a city. I wanted to continue being in a writers group, but I wasn’t making much money at the time, so I decided maybe I should do it myself.

I made a list of people to ask and let them know I was forming a free group we would lead ourselves. I planned on having us meet  at a café around the corner from my apartment, one time a week. I chose books we could pick exercises from and we were ready to go.

A few of us enjoyed this group for a year and a few months. We started out with many more people, but only three of us liked it so well we continued. Giving up an evening a week can seem like a lot, but to me it was very educational. I appreciated and learned from the feedback I was given by these women who became my close friends over time.

I had a great time every week. I started out just wanting feedback on my writing, but ended up with several close friends, plus a lot of growth in my comfort level with many types of writing.

I started several other self run groups later on, and it was from this first group that I saw how enjoyable and educational it could be to do something like this on your own. Plus it was free, and I ended up with several closer friends with similar interests to mine.

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Weird Jobs On The Road Of Life

My boyfriend and I are both trying to learn how to get book published.  He is working on a novel and I am compiling my poetry and what I used to think of as lyrics into a manageable form on my free online blog.  In a way I judge myself and think I should already know how to get book published by now.  Life is strange though, it throws all kinds of curve balls your way and you never know what you might be doing any given year.  I have worked as a temporary tons of times and it still makes me laugh when I think of some of the jobs I was given.

One job entailed working in a cold warehouse for a week with one other person.  We had to drive little carts around because it was so big in that place, but what we were mostly being paid to do was repack apples.  We were removing the sticker from one company from the apples, and replacing it with the sticker from a differently named company.  Luckily they let us amuse ourselves by talking while we did this tedious task.  We were freezing and there were thousands of apples.  They did let us eat as much fruit as we wanted while we packed and that was good because they were storing many kinds of fruit besides apples in there.  Most of these strange jobs had some sort of perk like that.

I mostly did jobs like that when I was on Spring or Winter break from college to make some extra cash.  Thank goodness I didn’t have to do stuff like that all the time.  Another weird job I got like that was inspecting baby goggles for premature infants for a forty hour work week.  Since I wasn’t stuck doing these things all the time I definitely saw them with a sense of humor.  I even realized that someday when I was able to try to learn how to get book published again, I would have some funny memories to use if I wanted.

It is a really weird world we live in I think, and sometimes I am flabbergasted by the money system and what you can get paid to do.  These days it’s less like that because of the economy but if I am ever feeling dejected and I remind myself of some of the weird work worlds I’ve been in, it helps me keep perspective.

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Opportunities To Get To Know One Another

In one of my programs in college during my freshman year they made all of the students break up into a smaller writer group where we were supposed to write journal entries of a sort about ourselves and our life experiences and then we had to share the entries with each other and write comments.  This writer group was meant to help us get to know each other as people better because most of what we did in the program was sit and listen to professors give lectures, or watch movies on the topic or talk about books we read in smaller seminar groups.  So except for seeing people and talking in seminar sometimes you didn’t really get to know many of your fellow students.

My closest friend at college was in the writer group with me.  She lived next to me in the college housing which were called ‘mods’.  So we had gotten to know each other much better than many of the other students had gotten to know each other.  We studied together at night sometimes and went out grocery shopping and went to shows together on the weekends.

We both noticed after attending the smaller writers group for a while, that the guys in the group seemed to mostly use the assignment as an opportunity to hit on women they thought were cute like my friend and I.  We compared journals one day and we found out that various guys were using the exercise to tell us both that they thought we were attractive and they wanted to get to know us better.  We laughed about this because we thought it was a pretty opportunistic way to use the class exercise.  But I guess young people can feel isolated in college and they have raging hormones, and I suppose the act of asking someone out in writing that will be viewed later is probably easier than walking up to them and asking them in person.

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Are You A Natural At Self Marketing?

If you are an online writer and you work for a while on a book, once you finish it you will need to get yourself out into the public view and do some book marketing.  If it doesn’t matter to you if anyone ever reads your book, like say you wrote your memoirs strictly for your own use, then you can just put the manuscript back in your drawer and not worry about it.

Most people don’t spend the time and energy to write a book that no one is ever going to see.  They will find that they need to get an agent and submit the manuscript to publishers.  And then do some book marketing once they have gotten a bite from someone who wants to publish the book.

I have never been very good at marketing myself.  It’s my understanding that many creative types are the same way.  Even if you are a performance personality and you crave being on stage every minute of the day, it might not be your special talent to market your art.  If you are such a person, and you happen to have some money lying around, you can hire someone to help you market your book.  A book marketing person may work as an editor, or may just work as a book seller.  I never have had money laying around like that myself, and I used to work as a book buyer so I saw the side of marketing writing from the small publisher’s standpoint.  People have to do it themselves, so each author is probably going to spend some time getting the word out that you should read their book.

Once they do, and the book gets read by a few people, if they like it they will tell their friends.  This is the word of mouth style of marketing.  I have heard several pretty good success stories of people who wrote a book and had it become popular to sell several thousand copies and then got a major book deal from a larger publisher.  I guess the best tactic is to try every route you can to make your work a success.  Something is bound to be successful for you.

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My Radio Job

Most of the jobs I’ve had have entailed using a computer, and often, one of the pleasures I enjoyed while working was to listen to radio online free. I also listened to my own CD collection but I loved listening to new music and finding new radio stations. One of my jobs was to place ads for a local radio station. At that job of course I listened to that station. When it had too much indie rock playing and I got bored, I could listen to their amazing music library.

That station had been our city’s university station until it became linked with a local museum that was funded by one of the region’s millionaires. I had to place around twenty spots a day to showcase this museum and it’s current displays.

The station also had a free streaming service so you could listen to free radio online as far away as Thailand. One of my best friends had relocated there, and he streamed in the station. There is a fifteen hour time difference between Seattle and Thailand so he heard the night broadcasts.

He was still under the assumption that the radio station only played a wonderful, eclectic mix of music.

I knew better since I worked there during the day. I thought he was lucky to be able to listen to radio online free at night when I was sleeping.  There were no ads at night, or very few. The DJs could play whatever mixes they wanted to. There was no pressure.

During the day however, I had found there was a shelf of popular, usually boring music in the DJ booth. The DJ had to cycle a number of songs from these CDs an hour. Plus the ads played by the station had gotten more and more commercial even though the station was a National Public Radio station and still had to follow guidelines.

They gained a following of individuals who enjoyed emo or indie rock. Most of the in-studios they hosted while I worked there featured those genres. I’ve always tended to listen to the blues, punk, metal or hard rock, mixed with blue grass and country. Weird mix I know, but I became disgusted with the music the station played and that ultimately affected my decision to move on. Even though as ad placer I got great free perks like getting to be on event lists plus getting to go free to the concerts of my choice.

Unfortunately, the choice was limited because of the genres of music they were spending most of their time on. My friend from Thailand visited and listened to the station during the day. He told me he’d had no idea they’d gotten so limited. He didn’t like it either. It’s possible they have changed again, but I lost track years ago.

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A Fun Week Night Hobby

In the past I joined all kinds of assorted groups in hopes of learning something important. I took part in a dream group, a journal writing group, a woman’s group, a belly dance group, an improv acting group  and a writers group along with others.

I did take away quite a lot of knowledge and personal growth depending on the group and the instructor of the group. I tried attending groups where I had to pay a facilitator or teacher to teach the group. I also attended groups composed of my peers where we were doing it for fun, led it ourselves and didn’t have to pay anyone.

In college I had to take part in a writers group that was part of my full course of classes, what they called a ‘program’ at my college. This was a journal writing shop that was led by a highly skilled instructor. But I did also notice that she heavily utilized a book about how to lead yourself on a journal writing journey.

When I was done with school and moved to a city, this gave me an idea. I was composing a lot of poetry plus short, true stories and by that time I had tried out a bunch of different types of support groups for writing. I didn’t want to pay anyone to be in a writers group at that time because I couldn’t afford to.

I asked a few of my friends if they wanted to build our own group together. We would get together once a week at a local café and choose writing exercises from several good books.

Three of us ended up doing this for more than a year. Everyone else quit, but we all liked it enough and got enough diversity from it that we just wanted to keep on working. We tried a lot of different types of writing and we all felt that our writing skills developed in leaps and bounds from trying different things plus getting feedback from one another.

It was fun, plus if we didn’t feel that much like writing we could always just talk to each other and drink coffee. I became much closer with these friends than I expected to, and we maintained a friendship beyond writing after schedules changed and we determined not to continue on with the group.

One of the lessons I learned from this was that selecting an activity that you usually have to pay money to learn and facilitating it yourself is both fun and effective. And it can have extra benefits such as adding interest to the rest of your life and increasing friendships.

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