Friday, September 18, 2009

Tips for Authors - Author Interviews

Many review sites offer author interviews as a part of their promotional services. If you get the chance to do an interview, take it! Look at it as an additional chance to promote your book(s). There are two types of author interviews, written and spoken. This week we'll look at written interviews. Next week we'll explore interviews via radio (internet or traditional).

For written interviews, always remember, sell yourself! This is a chance for the reader to connect with the author. What makes the author tick? Why did he/she write the book? Where did his/her ideas come from? Readers want to know! You need to tell them! At Feathered Quill, we do our interviews via email - we send the author a group of questions and once he/she returns the answers to us, we post it on both our site and here on our blog. Our number one piece of advice is to be sure to check what you write! Is it grammatically correct? What about typos? Typically, if we find an obvious typo, we'll fix it but we can’t change the author’s words so be careful. We've received interviews with incomplete sentences, email "speak" (IMO, etc.), and other errors that make the author look less than literate. Proof your answers, read them again, then wait a day before sending them along, and read once more before sending to the review site. For many people, printing out the text and proofing it (rather than on the computer screen), allows them to catch errors. Does it make you sound like a professional? If so, then send it along and get it posted. Then link to it from your website. Use it as a promotional tool as you would a review. Don't let it languish on somebody else's site.

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