Should authors blog?

August 10, 2026 · 3 min read

Authors are told to blog roughly as often as they are told to be on social media, and with about as much regard for whether it will work for them specifically. It works extremely well for some and is a slow waste of writing time for others, and the dividing line is fairly clear.

The question that decides it

Do people search for what you know?

Nobody searches for your novel before they know it exists. They search for problems, decisions and how-to questions. So a blog works when your book sits on top of a body of knowledge that strangers are actively looking for — and does not when the book is the thing itself.

When blogging works

• Non-fiction with a subject. Someone searching "how to reduce sourdough proofing time" can find your article and then your bread book. That path exists and it compounds.
• A business or consultancy the book supports, where articles bring clients as well as readers.
• Deep genre expertise — historical fiction backed by real research, say, where the research itself is searched for.
• A niche where you can be genuinely definitive rather than one of ten thousand voices.

When it does not

For most novelists, a blog is time taken from the next book in exchange for very little. Posts about your writing process are read by other writers, which is a different audience from readers — pleasant, occasionally useful, but not people who buy fiction because they enjoyed a post about your outlining method.

And the most reliable marketing action available to a novelist remains the next book. A second title lifts the first, doubles your shelf space, and gives every new reader somewhere to go. A year of blog posts rarely competes with that.

If you do it, do it properly

1. Write for a question someone actually types, not for a topic you find interesting.
2. Answer it fully. A thin post that stops short of the answer helps nobody and ranks nowhere.
3. Publish on your own site. Posting to a platform builds that platform's audience and can vanish when it does.
4. Link each post to whatever it should lead to — a book, a service, a mailing list signup.
5. Publish on a rhythm you can hold for a year. Monthly, held, beats weekly abandoned in March.

What it is actually for

The mistake is treating a blog as a sales channel. Almost nobody reads an article and immediately buys a book. What articles do is bring strangers who did not know you existed into contact with you at all — and the conversion happens afterwards, through the mailing list signup on the page.

That is the whole mechanism: search brings a stranger, the article earns a minute of trust, the signup turns an anonymous visitor into someone you can reach again. Judge it on subscribers gained rather than on books sold, or you will switch it off before it has had a chance to work.

The realistic timeline

Search traffic is slow. A new site publishing steadily should expect months before articles bring meaningful visitors, and the ones that eventually work are usually not the ones you expected.

That is the trade. It is the slowest channel to start and the only one that keeps working while you are asleep, years after the post went up. If you cannot commit to a year, spend the time on the next book instead — that is a defensible choice, not a failure of nerve.