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Use Personal Interests to Market Your Novels Without Social Media

This is the sixth in a series of blog posts about marketing for fiction authors without using social media.

I will also mention two other things I blog about, which fall under Behind-the-Scenes but kind of have their own categories.

I’ll often write food into my books. For my contemporary novels, they’re usually family recipes. For my Regency novels, they’re recipes that I find in antique cookbooks from the era.

I’ll make the dish and post the recipe on my blog along with pictures. I recently polled my newsletter and Patreon and discovered my readers really liked the recipes, which surprised me. I will usually link to the blog post recipe in my newsletter and in a Patreon post. Here’s an example of a recipe.

I also like to knit, so I write knitted objects into the books (like shawls, scarves, socks, mittens). Then I knit the object and post the knitting pattern on my blog with photos.

I will link to the pattern in my newsletter and my Patreon, but I will also link to the pattern in Ravelry, a huge database for knitters and crocheters. They allow you to add your own original patterns to the database, and free patterns are always given a lot of visibility.

This has been a great source of free, evergreen, passive marketing for me, since the pattern features the cover of the book where the garment came from, and at the bottom of the pattern is a graphic with the first book in the series and a link to the book page on my website. Here’s an example of a knitting pattern blog post.

Granted, not all my readers knit, but many like to look at the blog post to see the pictures of the garment, since they have read about the character wearing it in the book.

Leveraging Personal Interests

This is an area where I think fiction authors can really expand their sales funnel if they can find creative things to blog about and a way to link to their blog posts like I did with the knitting. Most fiction authors have other interests besides their writing, and they can leverage that for blogging in conjunction with SEO. They just have to think a little outside the box to find something that would work.

For example, people wouldn’t know about the huge website Ravelry unless you’re a knitter or crocheter, and so I used my knowledge of that website to create content that I could link to from Ravelry.

Authors can leverage their own knowledge in their fields of interest to find things to blog about and ways to link to their blog and spread the word about their posts.

I also want to say that you don’t have to be an expert in something to blog about it, you just have to have had experience with it. I’m not a professional clothing designer and I’m not even that great a knitter, but my interest is in antique knitting patterns and making garments that my characters wear.

But whatever your interests, there are sure to be avenues for marketing that no one else will know about because that’s not their topic of interest.

For example, maybe you homeschool and you have experience in some sort of math trick, and you write that trick into your novel. You also write about the trick on your blog. You might also know about popular homeschool forum boards, or groups, or email lists, and you can post a link to your blog with the homeschool math trick—but there’s also a little graphic and link at the top and bottom of the blog post saying that this was the trick featured in your novel, titled XYZ. You’re not telling them to buy your book, but it gets the name and cover in front of people.

This is a wide top-of-funnel marketing method. Most people who visit my blog post about the knitting pattern aren’t going to buy my book. But there are a few who will. And my blog post about that knitting pattern will continue to get visitors month after month from people on Ravelry searching for a free pattern for a shawl, or a scarf, or armwarmers, or whatever it is that I have knit. It’s an evergreen marketing method that only took the time for me to knit the object and write up the pattern. (And, I suppose, I should count the time I took looking through the antique knitting book to find the pattern in the first place.)

So take some time to brainstorm your interests. What kinds of blog posts could you write that relate to your novel, even if only tangentially? See if there are websites or groups where you could post your blog post and get a lot of eyes on it.

If you could write several blog posts like that, you’ll have some top-of-funnel entryways for people to find out about your books.

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