Publishing Tips - Publishing Addict: How Blogging and Writing Go Hand-in-Hand**

In many ways, blogging is a natural next step for authors. Historically, big-name writers like Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene cut their teeth as journalists, writing articles on commission for newspapers to supplement their income from their literature.

In fact, blogging is just journalism for the 21st century, as is evidenced by the number of news outlets that are launching blogs of their own, as well as the number of blogs, like BuzzFeed, which have gone on to become fully-fledged media businesses in their own right.

For authors, then, blogging is nothing new. The trick for most is to figure out exactly how best to express themselves.

Common Author Blog Types

Some authors write on their own websites, and some opt to guest post for others. The Huffington Post, for example, accepts posts from a variety of subject matter experts, and there are plenty of savvy authors who use the platform to establish their reputation and to sell books at the same time.

While it’s a no-brainer for an author to have a website – and to host a blog on it to provide updates to their readers – there are plenty of other options, too. Depending upon their specialism and their target audience, it can even make sense to write articles for LinkedIn, Tumblr or for other social networks.

Some authors even go so far as to run a separate blog site. This can work well for those who work in a certain niche, and running a book blog has benefits for everyone. It does a great job of getting the word out, and book blog admins meet plenty of authors, publishers, publicists and agents while they’re at it.

A Community of BookTubers

In fact, it’s not just the written word that can lure even the most old-school authors from behind their typewriters and into the 21st century. As well as being the world’s foremost portal for cat videos (and the second largest search engine behind Google, which owns it), YouTube is also a hub for a new generation of video bloggers, who use it to share everything from tutorials and how-tos to haul videos and monthly wrap-ups.

YouTube is interesting because it has a sub-community of ‘BookTubers’ – YouTubers who share their love of books through reviews, tags, hauls and even BookTubeAThons, where readers are given a theme and a set of instructions and unleashed to read as much as possible over a short period of time, such as during a week or over a weekend.

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Photo credits: Bruce Guenter.