Day 14: Book Blog Content- The Interview

This is Day 14 of 30 Days to Build a Better Book Blog. We are still discussing Book Blog Content.

Before I began Christian Fiction Blog I ran a column for Suite 101 called African American Women Writer's Finding Voice. In this column I interviewed and later befriended some of the best women in publishing: authors, literary agents, publicists, editors and poets. That column gave me the fuel and the readership to take a deeper look at blogging, as my online source for providing an information asset. To this date the interviews that I host on this blog are some of the highest viewed content here. If you plan to build a book blog, even if the book blog is just about you and your writing, I encourage you to add some interview posts to bring credibility and more readers to your book blog.

You can create interviews in 3 different ways:

1. as a blog post. Here is an example of my interview with Nicole Seitz
   
2. as a podcast. I host Media Candy. We interview their and crosspromote the show in the christian fiction blog sidebar or with independent show notes posts.
   
3. as a vlogcast. Stay Tuned for Media Candy TV. coming soon. A vlogcast is interviewing via live video streaming or VoIP technology like Skype.
   

A few interview writing tips:

• When you are writing an interview, please note the proper format. Questions are italicized. The answer is written in plain text. This helps the reader differentiate the question from the response.
• write a one paragraph(two-three sentence) bio of the subject with a link back to their online hub(blog, site url, facebook fan page, social media release)
• if they have a current title, link it to your amazon associate, bookstore affiliate or chitika account(i will tell you why soon, just do it for now lol)
• submit the interview to the interviewee with the url link before you post

Below is an example of a print interview blog post...

My Soul to Keep author, Melanie Wells stopped by Christian Fiction Blog to participate in our 1Question Author Interview Series-The Valentine Edition. 2 Questions/Couple. Cute. The questions:

Who are your favorite fictional couple?

I hate to be a cliche' but I'd have to say Rhett Butler and Scarlet O'Hara. They're a charming, cantankerous relational disaster. You just want to smack 'em both.


And what have you learned about them that helps you build the romance arc of your own stories?

Like Rhett and Scarlett (at this point, any southerner knows to add "bless their hearts" -which is required if you're insulting someone) my characters are extremely flawed. My books tend to be populated with broken - or at least bent - people. But they're so likeable, you're rooting for them anyway. Dylan Foster (bless her heart) just can't quite seem to get it right, which keeps the tension running all the way through the story. You WANT it to work out between her and David-who-owns-a-funeral-home-in-Hillsboro, but you're also sitting there thinking, Dylan, you need to go to time out, and David, for crying out loud, get a SPINE and stand up to this woman. They're a mess. That's what makes the story work. Happiness is sort of boring, if you think about it.

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