Do you want your book to do well? OF COURSE YOU DO. Well, here's some information for you: In order for your book to do well, you need an audience. You need eyes on you. Here are three ways to attract an audience:
1. Start a blog.
Start a blog dedicated to knitting. It can be about your knitting projects, patterns you love, or tutorials. And it's important that there's something different about your blog. There are a ton of knitting blogs out there. What makes your unique? Why should someone choose your blog over someone else's?
Once you have your blog idea, decide on a posting schedule. I would highly suggest once a week, always on the same day of the week. Everyone can manage putting up a post on a blog at least once a week. The important thing here is that you carve out time every. single. day. to write for your blog. Every day. You may be saying, "NO Grace! I'm busy! I don't have the time to devote daily to a blog." Yes you do! I'm asking for 15 minutes. Just 15 minutes. If you don't have that, you must say no to other things. Daily writing is not only the key to your blog, but it's also the key to your book. Start writing daily.
I want you to start writing every day and build up a backlog of 5 posts saved in your drafts. Treat it as if you're writing to meet your weekly deadline, but then when a post is ready to be published, save it to your drafts. Five posts is a great number to launch your blog with. Doing this will also demonstrate to yourself that you can write every day and get you into that routine. There are countless blogs out there with two or three posts, then they fell out of routine and gave up. Pre-writing 5 posts will already put you past those people.
Then, stick with it. Your audience should know that you post every week on this particular day. That's how consistent you should be. Get your blogging done--No excuses!
P.S. I would highly suggest blogger to create your blog. It's fairly simple to customize, and if you follow the steps I'll show you in the next posts, your blogger blog can be stunning! Plus, blogger's free.
2. Create a Ravelry Group
Once you have your blog, go on Ravelry and create a group. Go to the group tab and click "start a group." Now, Ravelry will ask you for a banner and a button. I'm going to show you in my next few posts how exactly to create these graphics. It's super super simple, I promise. If you create attractive buttons/banners it will capture people's attention when they're viewing the "Recently Added Groups" section. Then, they'll read into it, discover your unique idea, join the group, and boom. Five posts in and you already have an audience.
I would suggest creating a new thread in your group for every blog post you write. Give people a short description and then link over to your blog. If you want to, you can re-purpose your blog post and put all the content directly in your thread, that way people don't have to click over to your blog to receive the value you're offering.
"But Grace, don't I want those views counted on my blog????"
Not necessarily. It matters that you have eyes on you. It doesn't matter where you are when those eyes are on you. As long as you're providing helpful information, people will like you and follow you and quite likely reimburse you! Obviously, your purpose should not be the reimbursement, it should be your why (which I explain in this post).
Also, in your thread, ask your audience a question or two per post so that they can respond to you! Get in there and comment back to people. It's super fun and can quite often lead to ideas for future posts.
3. Provide a TON of value.
Giving people your wisdom and insight is the one really solid way to gain an audience and ensure that a good percentage of them will buy from you. If you provide value to people for free, they will be more quick to reimburse you (ie buy your book or pattern). So create tutorials and guides, give away free patterns, and teach everything you know. Even a beginner can teach. If you know something someone else does not, you can teach.
Working up a huge body of work also brings more people to your blog through search engines and keywords. Then, they'll tell their friends about you and so on and so forth.
So, in every blog post and interaction, offer value to your readers.
I hope I've done just that in this post!
See you next week! Have a fantastic weekend.
Grace
