GUEST BLOGGER HINTS, IDEAS, AND GUIDELINES

By serving as a guest blogger, you're helping build the community at 49 Writers, and you're also seizing an opportunity for free (though not blatant) promotion of yourself and your books. Our goal is to feature an Alaskan author each month. We'll post your photo and a photo of one of your books. In return, you email one or more short posts a week - by short, we mean a few paragraphs that you write in fifteen minutes or so.

If you're not interested in a month-long commitment, we still love to publish occasional guest posts of interest to our readers. Contact us with your idea and we'll see how it fits in.

Even well-published writers can be put off by the idea of blogging. What will I talk about? How will readers respond? And most off-putting of all, how much of my valuable time will I spend writing something for which I won’t get paid?

The good news: Blogging is fun. It’s easy. And while we won’t be sending a check, we can (just about) promise a nice pay-off in connections with readers and spreading the word about the great stuff you write (and get paid for).

When blogging, you don’t need to labor over every sentence. Be spontaneous! Have fun! Celebrate your voice! (But please, while we want you to get excited, tuck those exclamation marks away for another use.)

Now - serious tips, some from our own experience and some gleaned from The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging – with 260,000 registered members posting up to 20,000 comments a day, we figure they know what they’re talking about.

• Your audience: Our readers love books and writing and Alaska. Some are well-published; others are somewhere on the road to publication. Others have no aspirations to write but love to know how writers think (scary, isn’t it?)
• What to write: What engages you will engage your readers. Spin off something you read or heard or saw online. Or share a random thought, a snippet of what might develop into a full story or article if you had the time or inclination. Or focus on a specific detail, whether it’s the view from your window or a factoid that gets you riled up or pondering. If you’re really stumped, try a short op-ed formula: state your point, illustrate with an anecdote, give a short history of the debate, argue your side, consider the opposition, and end with a good walk-off. But that’s only if you want to op-ed.
• How to write: No need to fully develop your ideas. Get them out there and let readers join the dialogue. Write like you speak. Your readers want authenticity, not perfection. And write short. More than 800 words probably won’t get read.

And courtesy of Gretchen Rubin (Happiness Project Blog), a few for-what-they’re-worth, take ‘em-or-leave’em tips:

• Be funny (not required, but a little humor never hurts)
• Give smart information (when you have it; some days it’s all we can do to type a complete sentence)
• Reveal your character
• Tell a story
• Give a picture of what it’s like to live where you live

Skim through our posts, and you'll get an idea of how blogging differs from formal publication. Pay special attention to the posts that generate comments. They're not necessarily the longest or the most thought-out; often, it's the short and immediate that connects with readers.

A few mechanical points: Use ALL CAPS for titles of your own books, italics for titles of other books. You can include links to other websites and blogs within your post - in fact, we encourage it. Just copy/paste the URL into your post and we'll magically transform it into a link.

Ready to sign on? Fill out our contact form if you haven't already. We'll assign you a month or give the green light to your topic. Copyright remains yours, of course; if we receive a request for a repost on another site, we'll run it by you first.