2 Steps to Convert Blog Readers Into Book Buyers and Grow an Engaged Audience

by Maria

how writers can get more blog engagement and traffic

It’s a gorgeous, sunny, birds-chirping kind of day here, I’ve got a big mug of Swing’s coffee next to me, and I can finally work without needing three layers of clothes to stay warm.

Sounds like the perfect kind of day to talk about engagement, right? (Humor me.)

As I was talking about last week, audience engagement is one of the most important (and sometimes overlooked!) aspects of successfully building a platform and launching a book. Your site traffic matters; your social media numbers matter; your publicity hits matter; but at the end of the day, what matters most is how many of your fans will actually spend their hard-earned money on your book.

So, as promised, I created a handy one-page printable that breaks down the two things you should be doing in order to increase engagement and convert more of your readers into book buyers. It’s fairly common sense–how close are you to your readers, and how consistently are you in contact with them? Yet I routinely see fabulous, smart, talented bloggers, brands, and experts not focusing on these two things. And it’s a shame, because you can touch so many more lives and spread your message more impactfully (I’m told this isn’t a word but let’s all ignore that) if you can connect more authentically and more effectively. Which is really what the two steps are all about.

Download the 2 Steps to Convert Blog Readers Into Book Buyers printable for free here. And let me know what you think–do you already focus on these things, or has your attention been focused on other things, like creating more content or boosting social media numbers?

Read, Eat, Drink: Author Websites, Pasta Roundup, and The Minimum Sage Cocktail

by Maria

Read:

Are you a writer? Do you have a website? If you answered yes to the first question and no to the second, get thee over to WordPress.com and sign up for a website, STAT. Mike Shatzkin, a publishing insider who writes a great marketing blog, wrote a post this week that sent shudders of horror through me.

He pointed out that many authors don’t have websites, and even worse, that now some publishers are thinking about building and owning websites for their bestselling authors. This is so fraught with complications (which I won’t get into here, since Shatzkin covers them already), and it’s also shortsighted. The impact the Internet will have on publishing is coming into crisper focus every day, and it’s no longer possible to turn away from the fact that authors must have an online presence. Every single one of them. And that presence must be owned and managed by the author, or by an employee or consultant working on behalf of the author.

I feel a bit like a crazed doomsday prophet screeching about the interwebs sometimes, but take heed, authors, for the Internets shall not pass!  The online world isn’t going to go away, and it’s becoming an increasingly important part of our offline world. You need to exist in both places. And if you don’t have a website or some form of social media, you don’t exist to the all-powerful Google, and you don’t exist to the millions of potential readers who are looking for someone like you. So, I repeat, in my most annoyingly nagging tone possible: get a website!

Read the rest of Shatkin’s article here.

Eat:

Lately, I’ve been craving pasta. Just kidding. Every single day of my life since birth I’ve craved pasta. I predict that 50 years from now someone will isolate the addicted-to-pasta gene on a strand of DNA, and I will finally have answers about my condition. Until then, let’s all drool over these ridiculously good-looking bowls of pasta:

Reginetti with Savoy Cabbage

Reginetti with Savoy Cabbage and Pancetta. That reginetti is so cute I could just eat it right up.  (I guess that’s the point, huh?) Recipe here.

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What Does It Mean to Have an Engaged Audience, and Why Does It Matter?

by Maria

 

how to make readers more engaged

Engagement. It’s a buzz word in both blogging and publishing, but what does it actually mean? Is it the next “synergy”–my favorite marketingspeak word that I love to hate?

As I wrote about here, a lot of my process of sorting through potential clients involves looking at hard numbers—traffic stats, social media followers, subscribers, etc. But in reality, what I’m looking for underneath all of that is simply engagement. Does the potential author have a highly engaged audience? Do they already have a large group of fans who would fork over their hard-earned cash for a book?

This could be an audience of millions, in which 10% of the people are engaged enough to make a purchase, or it could be an audience of 50,000, where every last person would gladly exchange $21.95 for your book. The size of the total audience matters to a certain extent, but when it comes down to it, it’s really the conversion rate that means the difference between a bestseller and a flop. (I wrote more about the “stickiness” factor of engagement and conversion rates here.)

Conversion rate can sound like more empty marketingspeak (one of my writing pet peeves!), but it’s really a simple concept that boils down to this: how close are you to your audience? Think of this closeness like you’d think of your real-life social circles, where you have varying levels of familiarity with everyone from your spouse to your mailman. Here’s what that usually looks like:

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Deal News: DAMN DELICIOUS by Chungah Rhee

by Maria

damn delicious book deal chung ah rhee

I realized this weekend that I’ve been doing a terrible job of announcing The Good Stuff. I’m always so focused on trying to help writers improve their craft and their platforms, but in reality, The Good Stuff can be just as inspiring as any practical advice. After all, the dream of getting a book deal is what makes all the long days and hard work of platform-building worth it.

So one of my goals for 2015 will be to share all The Good Stuff that’s happening behind the scenes of my day-to-day work. And today I’m excited to officially announce a deal that’s been long in the works: Damn Delicious by Chungah Rhee, to be published by Oxmoor House in Fall 2016!  Here’s the official Publishers Marketplace announcement:

Damn Delicious Book Deal

The book will be a gorgeous collection of the quickest, easiest recipes that have won Damn Delicious its huge readership. It will be published in association with Cooking Light, which means every recipe will include handy nutritional stats and be rigorously tested by the experts at the Cooking Light test kitchen.

I’m especially excited about this project because, while working with Chungah on the proposal and deal, I became completely addicted to her food. Seriously. Her recipes keep us fed around here. And yes, maybe I am not the most unbiased person to be raving about this, but I really am continually blown away by how easy, flavorful, and fun her recipes are. Here are a few favorites that have become part of our weekday rotation:

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