How to build an effective content strategy

Reading Time: 7 minutes For authors and publishers, content is our bread and butter. But content no longer just mean the products we publish – it also means marketing. So how do we build an effective content strategy? This question was addressed at the 2015 London Book Fair Publishing for Digital Minds Conference.

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Social media – the pros and cons for writers

Reading Time: 5 minutes Social media has been key to Emily Benet’s success as a writer. Her first book, Shop Girl Diaries, started life as a blog; her second, The Temp, as a serialised novel posted online; and her latest, #PleaseRetweet, is a comedy about social media obsession. Social media is a wonderful tool for writers – but it has pitfalls too. The key is to use it, and not let it use you, as she reveals in her top pros and cons of social media for writers.

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Emily Benet’s blog-to-book-to-sitcom success story

Reading Time: 2 minutes We’re all familiar with blog-to-book success stories. But what about blog-to-sitcom? Regular readers will remember Emily Benet. She won the 2010 Author Blog Award in the Published Author category, which was announced at the Publishing Talk tweetup at the London Book Fair. Her début book, Shop Girl Diaries, began as a weekly blog about working in her mum’s unusual chandelier shop.

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How to Promote Your Books with Pinterest

Reading Time: 6 minutes Are you on Pinterest yet? The latest social media phenomenon has crept up on many of us – yet the statistics show that pinning is winning. Pinterest is already the third most popular social network after Facebook and Twitter, according to a 2012 report by Experian. It has an estimated 13 million users. It is the fastest site ever to break through the 10 million unique US visitors mark according to comScore. And it now drives more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined, according to a Shareaholic study in January 2012. All of which is reason enough to take an interest in Pinterest. But what is it – and how can you use it as a publisher or an author?

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How to Promote Your Blog with Twitter

Reading Time: 2 minutes One of the best ways to use Twitter is as a way to promote your blog – which in turn promotes your book, your writing, or your publishing business. Twitter is by far the biggest driver of traffic to my blogs because an automatic tweet is posted whenever I publish a blog post – without even having to log in to Twitter. This tutorial will show you how it’s done, using Twitterfeed.

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