Cheers,

When you write the blog, there will be an option to tag. If you have trouble, shoot me an e-mail, ;).

Never mind, I found some resources. Thanks for the tips!

Your name is not what is unique. Your content is. Stephen King. Dan Brown. Sandra Brown. Bob Mayer. These names are not all that unique. In fact they are very common. What is unique is what they write. If you use my book and do as I teach you, you will boot all the others with your name off the first page. You have any idea how common “Kristen Lamb” is? But google it and the first page is almost always all me. Most people with your name are not intentionally trying to dominate a search. You need to have your NAME. The Stave Church might be an interesting topic, but that isn’t how people are going to look for your book. They will search by name. Tie the Stave Church to your name. and building a blog around this one topic will cost you a lot of time. Unless this is the only topic you ever want to write about…ever. You will have to start all over for your next book. And your next.

My advice is to open a new blog if you don’t already have a lot of followers. People are going to read your fiction because they like you…not a topic. I have spent the past four weeks reading Michael Crichton because I like Crichton. And I have read about nanotechnology in Arizona, monkeys in Africa, DNA research in California, history research in France, and time travel in New Mexico.

Transfer the content you have on the Stave Church blog to the new blog that uses your NAME. If you can’t get your name, use a variation. Like I could have Author Kristen Lamb. KLamb. KristenLambTX. WriterKristenLamb. People generally don’t look too much at the URL…but change the blog title. As you can see, this blog has warriorwriters in the URL, but Kristen Lamb as the title. I started this blog for Bob Mayer, but people liked my contributions, so I stayed and took over the blog. I had a very large following at the time and didn’t want to risk a transfer. If you don’t want to move the whole blog, that is also an option.

But you need to rectify this. An agent will google your name and if she can’t find you, she won’t rep you. Agents more and more want to see fiction authors who can demonstrate a solid platform for their name that drives sales of THEIR book. The way you have things set up, you are going to get people passionate about a topic, but since they don’t know your name, they can’t buy it and could even, in frustration, end up buying a book by another author. The way you are blogging will gain you no brownie points with an agent or an editor.

I hope this helps. At least change the blog’s title and make sure to always put your NAME in the blog’s tags. That will mitigate the damage of starting out the wrong way, If you google my name, you will see the warriorwriters blog (this blog) comes up in the search.

Merry christmas and…African or European? 😉

I do have one query about the name branding thing. My name is not that unusual, if I google it loads of other people come up. I have considered a pen name, but I’m an academic and already have an article published under my own name.

That wouldn’t be an issue, except that my novel writing and my research is inextricably linked at the moment. What I study is very obscure and fascinating – medieval runic graffiti in Norwegian stavechurches. I intend to make a popular book from it when the thesis is done, with lots of nice pictures and juicy info. Loads of people find it fascinating (honest…!) so I am hoping it will sell.

My current novel (and a half finished nano) uses my research as a wonderful backdrop for the story, medieval Norway, based around a stavechurch. It is a USP and quite memorable, more so than my name. I have several useful tags and have been using the nick Stavechurch on nano and other places (I foolishly missed out on it in WordPress by failing to realise that if you start a blog with that name in a different user then you are not allowed to have that name as another user on the grounds it is already someone’s blog title… oops!).

So, since I have several unique words to market with that people can remember and search more easily than my name, do you think that would be the best way to go? Or use my name even though it is common? Or think more about a pen name, even though it won’t link so well to my academic work?

I suppose one issue is if I want to write any novels that are not about stavechurches, runic inscriptions or medieval Norway…

I am building a stavechurch blog about my work, based on the content, which at the moment is the non-fiction angle, but when I have written more of the novel will be a good platform for that, as I will hopefully already have built up a base of interested followers. I’m sure that will be easiest to find using the word stavechurch as its title. But should I post to it from this account or from AFJones (my other username, couldn’t even get my full name, someone already has it!)

Thanks for all your help 🙂

Oh, and what is the average air speed velocity of the unladen swallow? 😉