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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25782
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25782
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

A blog can definitely build an audience for a book, and the existence of that audience can definitely help sell the book to a publisher, and afterwards the blog can help sell the book to the public. That is exactly how I did it with my book _Every Page is Page One_, which is a book about writing for the Web, largely for technical writers.

But whether it works for fiction is a different matter. My Every Page is Page One blog (which is still going) is about the same subject at the book. A novelists blog, on the other hand, is not usually about the same thing as their novel. They are often very dull things repeating standard grammatical and writing school advice. There are thousands of them, and they are, for the most part, deadly dull, and almost certainly doing nothing to help sell books.

The other thing about my blog is that it is a niche blog in a technical non-fiction area. That means that although the audience is not that big, the conversion rate is pretty high. A lot of people who read my blog also buy the book. I don't see how a fiction writer carves out a niche like that or achieves that kind of conversion rate.

And I am not sure any of it matters. While there are probably more people writing novels than reading them these days, the fact remains that gifted storytellers remain rare, and publishers are eager to find them. Show them that you can tell a ripping yarn, and you don't have to bring an audience with you.

Original score: 6