Hi, guys! So I've been doing the book blogger thing for a couple of years, and I recently came to a conclusion: Authors have no idea how to do up a proper guest post. I'm soooo not picking on anyone. It's daunting. But I'm going to come from the blogger's perspective here. The one question I get asked the most by debut authors when they write me about guest posting on
YA Bound is, So what do I need to include in my guest post?
I want to answer that here. In my author space. It's okay to be confused, because ya know, we're all knew at this, and there's a first time for everything. But, if you send a book blogger a well formatted guest post, they will love you long time and want to work with you again. You're making their job easy, and they love being able to slap a simple guest post up that looks great, brings traffic to their site, and they don't have to fuss over searching the Internet for links.
**Do not send them pages (plural) of your guest post. Readers of blogs and the bloggers themselves, prefer short and to the point. Unless you're super famous, no one is going to read three pages of your post. Keep it short, clear, and appealing to the eye.**
First, open Word and use your standard Times 12 font, single spaced. For Internet content, there are no indents. So forget about that tabs key. It no longer exists. Then type in the "Name of Your Post by Your Name". Center it, and you can even put it in bold if you'd like. That's a preference thing.
Now, hit enter a couple of times and type out your guest post. Word is awesome, because it has that insert tab, where you can insert images and links. Go ahead and place the images and links that you want the blogger to use where you want them in the document. This helps the blogger visualize where she/he needs to put the images. You'll have to send the images to her/him as attachments, as Blogger and some other blogs won't allow you to simply copy and paste the images, they'll have to upload them. But having this visual is really nice. It ensures that your guest post looks the way you intended it to. If you really want to get crafty, you can send the blogger the HTML code. That way all they have to do is copy and paste, no uploading images, but that's another post. I won't get into that here.
After you're finished typing out your guest post and inserting images and links, hit enter a couple of times and put your author bio at the bottom. Include your author pic, and all your author-ly links. This is the biggest thing I see authors forget to do. Which means that the blogger has to hunt down all your links, because she/he wants to give their readers as much information on you as possible. It's professional. And when you do this for them, they clap and cheer, because it saves them a lot of time.
Don't forget to also send over your book cover, summary, and the links to where people can find your book(s) too. You can include this in the body of the email, if you want.
And that's it! I hope this helps.
**Updated for clarity*
Here is an example of a well formatted guest post right here on this blog. Lisa sent me her post, and it looked just like this in Word. All I did was simply copy and paste, and then upload the images and place them where she had them.**
